The theft of a pocket-watch and the appearance of a mysterious, locked strongbox bring famed magician Harry Houdini together with consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, in a case that rocks Britain to its core. When the magician is blackmailed into besting the box's lock, Holmes and Houdini expose a plot against the Crown itself. In the tradition of Nicholas Meyer's bestseller, "The 7% Solution," Lee Matthias recreates Arthur Conan Doyle's magnificent style and characters in "The Pandora Plague," a period feast, bursting with the raucous energy of a world throwing off the romanticism of the Victorian Age for the power and dangerous potential of science, new philosophies, and the machine. Sherlock Holmes is at his peak. The brash, young Houdini challenges all who stand in his way. And Watson, Holmes's chronicler and friend, returns us to a time when the gas was always lit, the Persian slipper always filled with shag, and the game was, once again, and at long last...afoot.