Some legends refuse to sleep.

London, late in the life of Thomas Pettigrew—the great detective of Baker Street—and the bronze sphinx on his bedroom pedestal has begun to stir. Or so he believes.

For decades, Pettigrew and his partner, the renowned archaeologist Flinders Petrie, have moved through a world of shadows and wonders: duels with assassins in Egyptian temples, encounters with secret societies, the whispered curses of Cleopatra’s tomb, and the long, strange pull of the Nile. Their cases were never merely about crime. They were about myth made flesh—and the price of surviving the legends you inhabit.

Now Petrie is gone. And Pettigrew, alone in his London flat with his memories and his sphinx, must face the last and most unsparing mystery of all: what remains of a man when everyone who knew him has slipped into the past?

When the Sphinx Awakens is a sweeping historical adventure and an intimate meditation on memory, mortality, and the stories we carry until we can carry them no longer. Steeped in the atmospheres of Victorian London, the deserts of Egypt, and the literary world of Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is the story of a man who lived between worlds—and of the sphinx that watched over him until his final breath.

Fans of Sherlock Holmes, The Shadow of the Wind, and The Mummy will find themselves instantly at home—and utterly unable to leave.