Island of the Mad by Laurie R. King

Island of the Mad: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King - 306 pages including Author's Note and Acknwlegements

The latest installment in the series that began with The Beekeeper's Apprentice.  

Russell is asked by a friend from her college days to find out whether the friend’s aunt (a wealthy heiress) has disappeared of her own free will, has been kidnapped, or has suffered another mental breakdown.

Russell’s search for Vivian Beaconsfield leads her from Bedlam Hospital to Venice. Fortuitously, her husband Sherlock Holmes has agreed to a reconiassance mission for his brother Mycroft, who needs someone to assess the potential threat posed by the rise of the Fascists in Italy. Too many right wing politicians in England think that a strong man like Mussolini is what's needed to keep the masses under control --- and not just in Italy. 

Russell hunts for evidence of Vivian’s presence among the expatriate community drinking and carousing on the Lido, where she insinuates herself into the fast company of Elsa Maxwell. Meanwhile, Holmes gains entry into the household of the American composer Cole Porter and his wife Linda. The Porters drop millions of lira into the local economy, but their guest lists are more exclusive, focusing on people of power and influence, including the Venetian Fascists.

One of the reasons this series is so much more satisfying than other Holmes pastiches is not just Russell’s character but the way that she has absorbed Holmes’ methods and applies them with the different sensibilities of both her generation and gender in a new century.

There are two serious themes lurking beneath the mysteries here. One is the rise of fascism in 1920s Europe and how easily the fascists took control of Italy. Any similarities between that situation and xenophobic regimes today are likely intentional.

Likewise the mystery that takes Russell to Venice in the first place. Her friend’s aunt was committed to Bedlam, the psychiatric asylum in London, for years. She stayed on there voluntarily when she could have left.  Now she has disappeared. Russell realizes the real mystery is why she was committed in the first place.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.






 

Lockdown by Laurie R. King

Lockdown: A Novel of Suspense by Laurie R. King --- 383 pages

Laurie R. King is best known for her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series but she has also written a number of contemporary mystery/suspense novels, including the Kate Martinelli series and several other stand alone novels.

In Lockdown she sets up a nightmare scenario that has grown all too familiar in real life: a struggling small town California middle school is sent into lockdown in the midst of Career Day when it becomes the target of a mass shooter acting out his fantasy of retribution and vengeance.

King says in her Acknowledgements at the end of the book that this is an idea she has been working on for twenty years, and that the structure of the story is in part created by a series of previously published short stories written over that period, and here linked together to create a multiple point-of-view narrative, jumping forward and backward in time. This allows her to show events from many perspectives and to build suspense through foreshadowing.

It's a compelling theme, playing to our worst fears and secret hopes. I found it very different from King's other novels. While she does a good job of building the suspense, the plot is convoluted. Perhaps it would have been tighter and more focused if she had not tried to include some of the short stories? The ghost element seemed rather awkwardly sandwiched in.

But even one of King's minor efforts is well worth the time spent reading.

Click HERE to read the review from Kirkus Reviews.

Click HERE to read the review from Publishers Weekly.

The Murder of Mary Russell by Laurie R. King

The Murder of Mary Russell: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King --- 359 pages

The fifteenth book in the brilliant series featuring Sherlock Holmes and his wife Mary Russell.  It's 1925 and Russell and Holmes are just returned to their quiet Sussex home after thier latest international intrigue. Holmes is away and Mrs Hudson, the housekeeper, has gone out to do the shopping, leaving Mary home alone to enjoy the peace and quiet.  Then a stranger arrives at the door, claiming to be Mrs. Hudson's longlost son from Australia.  Mary didn't know Mrs. Hudson had a son; that's the first clue that something about this situation is wrong.

Sometime later, Mrs. Hudson arrives, to find the house empty, the smell of gun powder, signs of a struggle, blood pooled on the floor in the parlor, and --- Mary missing.

Sherlock Holmes knows the key to his wife's fate lies in a deadly secret hidden in the long-buried past of his respectable housekeeper.

Once again, King takes a few minor threads from the Holmesian canon and weaves together a whole new perspective on the tale of the world's first consulting detective.

Click HERE to read a review from the Christian Science Monitor.

Click HERE to read a review from Kirkus.



 

Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King

Dreaming Spies: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King --- 331 pages

 The adventure begins on a cool spring afternoon in Sussex. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes have just returned home from Lisbon to find a peculiar addition to their garden: a distinctive stone they last saw in the Imperial gardens in Kyoto.

The stone reminds them of  another adventure one that ended tragically. On their way back from India, en route to San Francisco to sort out Russell's family affairs, the couple encounters a young Japanese woman who asks their help in foiling a blackmailer. Only after Russell and Holmes agree do they discover that the blackmailer's target is the Prince Regent Hirohito of Japan.

The most entertaining part of the book consists of Russell and Holmes' up close and personal encounters with daily life in the rural villages of 1924 Japan, as they travel the Nakasendo Road up the Kiso Valley, from the town of Arima to the village of Mojiro-joku, in the guise of Buddhist pilgrims.  Also interesting are the descriptions of the Bodleian Library and its librarians in Oxford.

The seventeenth century itinerant poet and master of haiku is frequently invoked in these pages, as is Shakespeare's Sir John Falstaff of Henry the Fourth and Fifth, and the English poet Matthew Arnold, whose "dreaming spires" of Oxford become the punning title of this book in a sly reference to the Japanese speaker's difficulties in pronouncing the letter "r" in English.

This is the thirteenth book in the Mary Russell series, but chronologically this one fills the previous gap between The Game (No. Seven), and Locked Rooms (No. Eight) and it;s immediate sequel, The Language of Bees (No. Nine).

Click HERE to read an interview with Laurie R. King in the San Francisco Examiner.

Click HERE to view the book trailer for Dreaming Spies on Youtube.

The Bones of Paris by Laurie R. King

The Bones of Paris: A Novel of Suspense by Laurie R. King --- 412 pages

This is a sequel to King's novel Touchstone. The action has moved from London to Paris; it's three years later (the fall of 1929), and Harris Stuyvesant, former Bureau of Investigation agent is now eking out a precarious living as a private investigator in Europe. At the moment he's being paid a handsome retainer to troll the cafes and bars of Montparnasse, looking for Pip Crosby, a young American woman who came to Paris to experience la vie boh`eme, and suddenly seems to have dropped out of sight. Her family in Boston are concerned enough to hire Stuyvesant.

As Stuyvesant tracks Pip's erratic passage through the expatriate community of artists and writers he discovers that she has had dealings with many of them as an artist's model and aspiring actress and habitue of the clubs and cabarets. But none of them remember seeing her recently.

The investigation takes a darker turn however when Stuyvesant discovers Pip had been taken on as an actress at the Theatre de Grand-Guignol in Montmartre, where murder, depravity and sexual perversions are enacted on stage as a kind of psychological shock treatment for the lingering traumatic aftereffects of the Great War. At least, this is the theory argued by the Theatre's patron, the Comte Charmentier, a wealthy connoisseur of death. His great family mansion is built over the famous Paris catacombs filled with the bones of the dead in the Place D'Enfer; indeed a stair descending from the mansion into the catacombs leads to a great hall decorated with tapestries depicting the Danse Macabre, the "Dance with Death," where the Comte entertains guests.

Soon Stuyvesant begins to suspect that more than one missing girl has been enticed into a Danse Macabre among the bones of Paris, by an artist of death who renders his masterpieces in flesh and blood.

Click on a fan's Pinterest page for The Bones of Paris 

Touchstone by Laurie R. King

Touchstone: A Novel of Suspense by Laurie R. King --- 548 pages

From a remote cottage in Cornwall to the great house of an ancient and noble family, to the smouldering streets of London in the strife-wracked years between the two World Wars, King's suspenseful novel pits one hardheaded American agent on the track of an anarchist bomber against the Machiavellean schemes of a ruthless opportunist who will use any tool that comes to hand in his grasp for ultimate power.

When Harris Stuyvesant of the nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation  shows up on his London doorstep just days before the General Strike of 1926, Major Aldous Carstairs seizes on him as an opportunity to regain control of the reclusive man he has code-named "Touchstone" for his remarkable ability to reveal when people are telling the truth or lying. Carstairs tried once before to use Bennett Grey in his project to develop new methods of psychological interrogation, but Grey was so repulsed by Carstairs' sadistic delight that he refused to continue. Now Carstairs thinks he can use Stuyvesant to coerce Grey into cooperating with him again. But Stuyvesant is not the big, dumb, crass Yank that Carstairs thinks he is manipulating.

A entertaining tale, full or twists and turns, rich with historical details of a period of social upheaval, political intrigue and potential violence. King is the bestselling author of two mystery series, the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series and the modern day Kate Martinelli series, as well as a number of stand-alone suspense novels. The Bones of Paris, a sequel to Touchstone, is due out this fall.

 

Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King

Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes --- 266 pages

Following immediately on the heels of her previous book, Pirate King, it is 1924 and Russell and Holmes are still in the French protectorate of Morocco. Holmes has gone to visit his distant cousin, Marechal Hubert Lyautey, the French Resident General who administers the protectorate, while Russell finished her commitment to Fflytte Films. But when he returns to meet Russell as agreed he discovers that she left the film encampment suddenly in the night, in the company of a young native boy, abandoning her luggage, and leaving just a brief note to say she was going to the city of Fez. And there has been no word since.

While Holmes returns to Fez to hunt for his wife, Russell awakens in a strange room, with a pounding head and no memory of who she is. But she has blood on her hands, fragmented recollections of violence and pain and loss, and a conviction that her life is in danger from enemies that lurk in the shadows.

Morocco is a troubled land, split between the competing colonial powers of France and Spain, with rich iron deposits that a powerful German company wants to exploit. The Rif tribes, Berbers from the mountains, are fighting to establish an autonomous Republic; meanwhile a notorious bandit is pushing his claim to the throne of Morocco. And who should Russell and Holmes discover in the midst of all this intrigue but their friends and comrades from Palestine, ( see Oh Jerusalem! and Justice Hall) Mahmoud and Ali Hzar, undercover agents for Holmes' brother Mycroft and the British government.

King manages to insert Russell and Holmes very convincingly into the historical intrigues of colonialism, left to fester unresolved in the aftermath of World War I, inexorably sweeping the world into the maelstrom of another cataclysmic conflict.