London, 1891: a young woman arrives at Baker Street carrying a chess piece her father tried to burn — a red pawn carved from Indian ivory and stained the colour of old blood — and every Tuesday for seven weeks another piece has arrived by post with no letter and no demand, just the slow deliberate assembly of a game Colonel Sir Alistair Morven cannot bear to finish; as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are drawn into a case built on twenty-five years of silence, a stolen Indian chess set, a dead comrade's convenient fall from a horse in Hampshire, a guide named Dhanji who was blamed and forgotten, and a confession written but never sent reveal that the truth about the eastern ridge at Rudrapur Pass was buried not by enemies but by the men who were called heroes for surviving it; inspired by historical crime of its era while remaining entirely fictional, The Adventure of the Red Chessman is an original mystery about colonial guilt, old soldiers' silence, and a game in which the winner is merely the last man left ashamed.