Damien March hasn't thought of his eccentric uncle for almost twenty years when he receives a terse message by telegram: "Patrick dead. Father."
Damien, a journalist for the BBC in London, is even more shocked to learn that he has inherited his uncle's ramshackle house on Ionia, an isolated island off the coast of Cape Cod. Offered the choice between his own humdrum life and the strange isolation of his uncle's, Damien decides to swap.
Rummaging through his uncle's possessions, he find letters and writings that provide scattered clues to Patrick's solitary life. And when he discovers a fragment of an unpublished novel, 'The Confessions Of Mycroft Holmes', the stakes in the paperchase become dramatically higher. Mycroft Holmes, the older brother of Sherlock, is one of literature's most intriguing absences.
