Lot No. 249

Oxford, 1884. Beneath the ancient spires and manicured lawns of one of the world's most prestigious universities, something ancient and terrible has awakened. Abercrombie Smith shares a boarding house with Edward Bellingham, a reclusive scholar whose interests lean toward the forbidden: Egyptian antiquities and the secrets of the dead. When a series of vicious attacks rocks the college, leaving men battered and traumatized with no memory of their assailant, Smith begins to pry into his neighbor's affairs. What he discovers in Bellingham's locked chambers is a mummy, Lot No. 249, pulled from a tomb and given terrible new life. The scholar has mastered a dark art, and his千年-old servant now does his bidding in the night. As the attacks escalate and Bellingham's enemies fall one by one, Smith must confront not just a murderer, but the thin membrane between rational academia and the blood-soaked rituals of a civilization three thousand years dead. Conan Doyle abandons his celebrated detective for something far more unsettling: a tale where knowledge becomes a weapon and the past refuses to stay buried.