From the comforting glow of Baker Street gas-lamps to the gloom of the ocean's depths, Sherlock Holmes lays bare the secrets of men, monsters and evil in twelve new tales of the bizarre, the uncanny and the arcane. Featuring stories from: Kim Newman, Christopher Fowler, Stephen Volk, Tom English, William Meikle, Simon K Unsworth, Fred Saberhagen, Simon Clark, Kevin Cockle, Lawrence C Connolly, Paul Kane and Tony Richards.

David Llewellyn, a white American writer, becomes infatuated with a young black woman while vacationing on a small Caribbean island. But love is not all he finds in paradise. Llewellyn becomes enmeshed in a struggle between groups on the island battling for control of an old plantation estate that is key to their aspirations, and absorbed with the dark legend of a Victorian heiress reputed to have ritually killed young children in her search for eternal youth.

Llewellyn's own ambitions and desires become blinders. Even as strange events and ghostly warnings abound, he is unable to see a plot to recreate an ancient Celtic ceremony in which his own life will be the crucial blood sacrifice.

"Promises on a Ring of Stone" lifts the mask of polite smiles and friendly faces to expose deep-seated rifts in the society of an emerging nation in the 1970s. It is also the story of the struggle and mistrust between rich and poor, black and white, set against a backdrop of resurrected pagan rites and enduring voodoo beliefs.