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A contemporary Sherlock Holmes, the eccentric Bernie Quist is a consultant detective in the city of York. Christmas is days away and once again the reclusive sleuth will be quietly celebrating alone. His assistant Watson, a teenager from the Grimpen housing estate, has other ideas, mostly involving parties, girls and beer. Yuletide plans are halted when three chemists die and the fiancé of one hires them to look into her apparent suicide. After discovering the chemist wasn't engaged, they're drawn into the mystery when their employer is killed. Added to this, Watson has a puzzle of his own - Quist is clearly hiding something and he's curious to know what. The investigation leads to a shady cartel of northern businessmen, a forgotten Egyptian cult and an ancient evil lurking in the medieval alleyways of York. Quist's secret is also revealed, and Watson doesn't know what terrifies him the most. Bernie Quist is a consulting detective in the city of York. His assistant, Watson, a black teenager from Grimpen housing estate, is learning the role of assistant, which seems to involve making coffee, getting threatened by rotweillers and skinheads, and very little glamour. There have been two deaths by violence: a birdwatcher whose throat was ripped out, and a young woman who apparently carried her handbag to the train track and laid down on the rails. But the second woman was a researcher in the first woman's pharmaceuticals research lab. Then there's a third death: another person from the research lab. Quist and Watson are joined by a third man, Rex Grant, who acts like a 007 agent but whose story doesn't add up. The three find the fourth lab assistant, the last one alive, and hear a story about lab research that doesn't make sense: among the problems, they were to develop a sun screen that screened out the wrong rays from the sun. Other things that don't make sense begin turning up, like bodies drained of blood, bodies that look like they'd been slashed by giant claws