The story, set in 1889, mainly consists of a London hydraulic engineer, Mr. Victor Hatherley, recounting strange happenings of the night before, first to Dr. Watson who dresses the stump where Mr. Hatherley's thumb has been cut off, and then to Sherlock Holmes himself. Hatherley is visited in his office by an odd, suspicious man who identifies himself as Colonel Lysander Stark. He offers Hatherley a job at a country house to examine a hydraulic press used, as Stark explains, to compress fuller's earth into bricks, but Stark warns Hatherley to hold his tongue about the lucrative job, which will apparently pay 50 guineas.
Terrorists working to stop the building of a power plant threaten to trigger an earthquake on California's coast line. An FBI expert warns that the individual behind the threat is sane, capable and serious. If he causes the earthquake millions of lives will be at risk.
Jordan Buchanan is thrilled that her brother and best friend are tying the knot. The marriage of Dylan Buchanan and Kate MacKenna is no oridinary occasion. It represents the joining of two family dynasities. The ceremony and reception proceed without a hitch until a crasher appears claiming to be a MacKenna guest. The disheveled and eccentric professor of medieval history warns that there's "bad blood" between the couple's clans, stemming from an ancient feud that originated in Scotland and involving the Buchanan theft of a coveted MacKenna treasure.
This is a book of representations and self-representations, meant to display the variety and range of female experience as imagined in the medieval period. Some imaginings may, as Klapisch-Zuber warns, have pretensions to naturalism, but here we must be at our most wary as readers.