Daniel D. Victor Knihy

Romance blooms at Phillips Junior High when teacher Art Malamud, the school's union rep, meets Mandy Sayer, the newest member of the faculty. As the school year progresses, Art leads his colleagues in the historic Los Angeles teachers' strike of 1970 and stokes the ire of the principal, Vivian Laws. Though Art has tenure and relative immunity from Laws's personal attacks, Mandy does not. As a result, she receives an unfair evaluation of her first year's work and even harsher criticism at the start of her second. Mandy's local grievance leads to a major battle with the school district, and the injustice ends up threatening not only her professional life but her future with Art as well.

Quarantines, masks, death-terms familiar to anyone who faced the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918. World-wide, it is estimated that the horrifying influenza killed more than 50 million people, significantly more than did the guns of the Great War, which was just then coming to a close. And yet no one has ever heard from Sherlock Holmes or Dr. Watson concerning their own experiences surviving the terrible virus-until now. In a recently-discovered manuscript, Dr. Watson reveals the secret which for years had kept him silent about the deadly pandemic. Only when he meets the eccentric American novelist Sinclair Lewis is the truth pried free and the story of an ingenious murder revealed.

One moment the lovely young woman was walking through the Battle of Hastings exhibition at the British Museum; the next, she lay dead on the checkered museum floor, a Norman arrow protruding from her breast. Inspector Lestrade believed he had solved the mystery, but almost immediately recognized that Scotland Yard needed the help of Sherlock Holmes. From London to the Lake District, the master detective, along with his colleague Dr. Watson and recently-met American mystery writer, Anna Katharine Green, follows a string of clues that ultimately exposes the intricacies of a tragic love story-a woeful tale whose twists and turns reveal what Watson accurately called "the unhappiest of Holmes's adventures."