Emotion-filled memories come cascading from the mind of Britain's foremost investigator as a troubled Glastonbury sends its emissaries to beg help in solving a series of poisonings besetting a region Holmes had experienced and explored as a young lad. Somerset, battleground of successive invaders over the centuries, has a secret which forms a bond between all those born under the mantle of Britannia, a secret trying to break free but which, in doing so, might destroy the very fabric of Britain's hard-won but still tenuous unity. Sherlock Holmes, summoned to solve a murder threatening ruin to greater Glastonbury's commercial prosperity, finds that there are deeper motives behind his summons and that one secret hides a great many more and forces the Great Sleuth to make a decidedly deadly decision to taunt the grim and ghastly Ghoul of Glastonbury.