Told through the eyes of a watchmaker, Dr Thorndyke is once again faced with a nettly mystery involving a mysterious fire in a Soho house filled with supposedly inflammable objects. What transpires is an entertaining and amazing twist thanks to the eagle eyes of the Doctor and his friend the watchmaker, Mr Polton.

Dr. Richard Austin Freeman MRCS LSA was a British writer of detective stories, mostly featuring the medico-legal forensic investigator Dr. Thorndyke. He invented the inverted detective story (a crime fiction in which the commission of the crime is described at the beginning, usually including the identity of the perpetrator, with the story then describing the detective's attempt to solve the mystery). Roberts[who?] said that this invention was Freeman's most noticeable contribution to detective fiction. Freeman used some of his early experiences as a colonial surgeon in his novels. Many of the Dr. Thorndyke stories involve genuine, but sometimes arcane, points of scientific knowledge, from areas such as tropical medicine, metallurgy and toxicology.