Bogart Books Presents THE PALAIS PROTOCOL, the Debut Thriller by Thomas Glock
Four of the greatest detectives who ever lived. One killer the law can’t touch. One night to stop the next world war.
A locked-room thriller set at the 1925 Geneva disarmament conference launches the new series The Society of Singular Persons. On sale this week from Bogart Books.
BATON ROUGE, July 27, 2026. Bogart Books today announced the release of The Palais Protocol, the first novel by Thomas Glock and the opening book of the series The Society of Singular Persons. It goes on sale this week in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook, and at bogartbooks.com.
The setup is simple and deadly. Geneva, June 1925. Forty-five nations gather at the Palais to outlaw the weapons that turned the last war into a slaughterhouse. Behind the handshakes, one of them is still building them.
Then a man is found dead in a glass room bolted from the inside. No wound. No way in. Only a watch turned back to hide the hour of the lie.
The dead man is Dr. John Watson. He was killed by the very gas the conference met to ban.
The trail runs to a man no court can reach. Baron Anton von Reuth. Decorated diplomat. Shielded by the immunity of his office. And the murder, it turns out, was only the rehearsal. Von Reuth means to gas the closing gala, blame a rival nation, and turn the panic into the next European war.
Four strangers take up what no one else will. Sherlock Holmes, who came to Geneva to mourn a friend and stays to hunt his killer. Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief who has already robbed half the delegations in the building. Father Brown, who reads a soul the way other men read a train timetable. And Charlie Chan, a Honolulu police sergeant three thousand miles from his jurisdiction and never once out of his depth.
They agree on nothing. Their methods clash and their ages show. But they want the same thing, and one night to get it. Von Reuth has to lose his protection before midnight on the seventeenth of June, when the gas vents.
A classic puzzle and a modern thriller
The Palais Protocol is a fair-play locked-room mystery and an interwar political thriller at the same time. It fields four of fiction’s most famous sleuths, all now in the public domain, and sets them against a villain built for the twentieth century. Von Reuth is respectable and admired, and the law itself is his armor. He can’t be out-deduced into a confession or shamed into surrender. He has to be out-maneuvered.
The reader knows who the killer is from the first pages. The suspense is whether four aging men can catch up before the gala, working across language, jurisdiction, and ego, to convict a man the law has placed beyond reach.
Underneath the ticking clock runs a darker current. The money trail leads to Munich, to a movement refounded only months before. The detectives are fighting to strangle the next war in its cradle. They win the night. They cannot save the century. The reader knows where 1925 leads. The men in the glass room do not.
Glock writes fast and close, in short chapters that end on a hook, with the narration locked inside one character’s head at a time. It reads for the audience that turns out for Robert Harris, Alan Furst, and Philip Kerr, with the ensemble pull of the Knives Out era of closed-circle mysteries.
A word from the author
“Four detectives everyone thinks they know, dropped into the year the modern world begins,” said Thomas Glock. “These are men of the nineteenth century. The evil across the table has a passport, a corporation, and a future. I wanted to know whether the old methods still worked against that. The answer turned out to be the whole book.”
Glock is quick to say the novel is not a pastiche. It does not imitate the prose of Doyle, Leblanc, Chesterton, or Biggers. It borrows their detectives and hands them to a reader who wants a thriller that moves.
“The murder of Watson is the emotional engine,” Glock added. “For Holmes it is the one case that is also a grief. That is the death nobody in power wants solved, which is exactly why it has to be.”
The start of a series
The Palais Protocol opens The Society of Singular Persons, a trilogy that reassembles this bench of detectives across cities against a single hidden adversary, a sworn secret court called the Fehm. Book Two, The Fehm Fatale, is already underway. The series line puts it plainly: the minds the world forgot, and the conspiracy that needs them gone.
Availability
The Palais Protocol by Thomas Glock is available this week from Bogart Books in hardcover, trade paperback, and ebook, wherever books are sold. Sample chapters, cover art, and buying links are at bogartbooks.com.
Title: The Palais Protocol
Series: The Savant Society, Book One
Author: Thomas Glock
Publisher: Bogart Books
On sale: July 27, 2026
Formats: Hardcover, trade paperback, ebook
Price: $24.99 hardcover / $14.99 paperback / $4.99 ebook
ISBN: 979-8997038502
Pages: 372