Wishing to track down a past girlfriend who claims he had fathered her child, the rich and dying Damian Baxter contacts an old friend from his days at Cambridge. The search takes the narrator back to 1960s London, where everything is changing--just not always quite as expected.

"Nancy Wix, daughter of stage impresarios Eliza and Devil, is a born performer. But she is set apart, even from her unusual family, by the visions she has seen since she was a child. When a gifted medium reveals a way for Nancy to harness her troubling powers to keep the Wix's struggling theatre afloat, she grasps the opportunity with a desperate intensity. This is the age of spiritualism, and Nancy will see her star rise in a time when families decimated...

In 1923, Eva travels as a missionary to the ancient Chinese city of Kashgar on the Silk Road with an ulterior motive to write "A Lady Cyclist's Guide to Kashgar;" and in present day London, Frieda befriends a homeless Yemeni refugee.

Stephen Newman, a husband who grew up in Los Angeles and had one time lived in an anarchist collective during the 1970s, is proud of the life he built with his wife in England and the children they raised, but, as the turn of the century approaches, the events of late middle-age make him question the world in which he has been living.

Relates what becomes of Ermengarde and the other girls left behind at Miss Minchin's School after Sara Crewe leaves to live with her guardian, the Indian gentleman.

"Sherlock Holmes' daughter faces a new unsolvable mystery with spies and a threat to the crown. Joanna and the Watsons receive an unexpected visitor to 221b Baker Street during a nocturnal storm. A rain-drenched Dr. Alexander Verner arrives with a most harrowing tale. Verner has just returned from an unsettling trip to see a patient who he believes is being held against his will. Joanna quickly realizes that Verner's patient is a high-ranking Englishman...