The beginning of this book was very dull. And the sections of dialogue between Holmes and Damian or Holmes and Mycroft interrupted the flow of the narrative and were extremely annoying. I'm glad this disappeared as the book went on, almost as if King realized, belatedly, it wasn't working. Too...
Very disappointing installment in the Mary Russell's saga. I'm not sure what Laurie King had in mind when thinking about writing this book. This is not a real pirate story as the action is scarce and the insights into pirate's life and their motives is even less consistent. Characters are barely ...
I had a really hard time following the plot of this book -- I could keep track of the characters, but for some reason I never got my head around all of the factions and groups and international relations issues involved.As a related aside: I'm getting fed up with Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell ...
Probably my favorite of the Mary Russell series.Part 2 of 2. I've read this series very out of order but still quite enjoy it. This book was no exception.
A collection of light, mostly enjoyable stories inspired by Sherlock Holmes. Some are new stories with the Sherlock Holmes characters. Some are retellings of Sherlock mysteries with new characters. Others step even further from the originals. As with all short story collections, the quality of th...
I like Laurie King's work in general and love her take on Sherlock Holmes through the character of Mary Russell. I was not so taken with this story and I realized that part of the problem for me is the point of view. Holmes is a fascinating character to describe from the outside, but is very di...
A short mystery featuring Russell and Mrs. Hudson, with Holmes in the background. Small thefts have been occurring in homes around the area and Mrs. Hudson has noticed things missing as well. When Holmes can't be bothered to look into it, Mary agrees to set up a camera to catch the thief in the a...
FOLLY (Mys/Novel-Rae Newborn-Washington State-Cont) – ExKing, Laurie R. – StandaloneBantam, 2001, US Hardcover – ISBN: 0553111035First Sentence: The gray-haired woman stood with her boots planted on the rocky promontory and watched what was left of her family pull away.Rae Newborn is a woodwork...
While not to my benefit to read #5 before 2, 3 and 4, I didn't have the time at the library to sort thru the publication dates, so I went from the first Kate book to this one...from Lee being shot to aleady being up and walking and missed the having of the kiddo...but that;s ok........ I have re...
Posted to The Literary Lawyer.ca A Thinker's Mystery - 4.5 Stars I was not disappointed with the second novel in this (so far) intelligent series by Laurie R. King. In this novel, the author does an absolutely superb job of using the mystery to move the issues that the book contemplates. I ...
I gave this book 5 stars because I could NOT put it down. Halfway through I was completely committed to the plot and stayed up a few hours past my bedtime to finish it. the ending was quite, quite abrupt, which left me a little bit unsatisfied, but I still enjoyed myself up to that point.I was a ...
Slow to warm and fast to end, this Edgar Award winner finished on a high note that resolved some doubts I’d had through much of the book. Protagonist Kate and her partner Al are thrown together to investigate the murders of three girls. The location of the bodies in an enclave of simple living ...
Laurie King is a stylish writer, bur somehow I've tired of her. Liked Locked Rooms, but then the Mary Russell adventure after that seemed over-the-top in esoteric, obscure literary references and religious rites.I'd read and liked several of the Kate Martinelli mysteries, so after a rest of sever...
It is 1924, and in England, Mycroft Holmes summons his brother Sherlock and Sherlock's wife, Mary Russell, to a meeting. Mycroft has a request on behalf of the government: go to India to find Kimball O'Hara, the Kim of Rudyard Kipling's book. No, not a fictional character, but a flesh-and-blood m...
MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS.Fascinating. Both the context of a modern, original cult under surveillance by law enforcement, and the heroine herself -- religious studies Professor Anne Waverly.King likes to head each chapter w. some sort of passage. This time, it was multi-media - sometimes a drawing or ...
Mary Russell, also known as The Beekeeper's Apprentice, proves to be a wonderful addition to the Sherlock Holmes mythos!When 15-year-old Mary Russell almost tripped over the peculiar man while he was obsessively studying his bees, she never imagined such an accidental (and clumsy) encounter would...
Over the holidays, one of our major cleaning tasks was to pull all of our books off our various bookshelves, out from under our bed, in our dresser, in the closets, etc. and sort them. We sorted them into boxes to be donated to the library, boxes to put into storage, a pile to put into the “secon...
Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes are happily ensconced in their Sussex countryside home. Well, maybe ‘happily’ isn’t quite the right word. Mary has graduated from Oxford and is writing a theological book, while Holmes prowls their little house like a bad-tempered cat. Some days he inh...
This sixth novel in the Mary Russell / Sherlock Holmes series may be my favourite so far. If so, it is not because of the mystery, which is whether the battlefield execution of a young officer in WWI was in fact a sophisticated murder. Nor it is because of anything that Russell and Holmes actua...
Keeping WatchLaurie R KingPsychological thriller isn't usually my genre but Keeping Watch is one of the most brilliantly written books I've read in a long while. Laurie King writes with the acuity of the master, never tripping throughout this exquisitely appalling tale.Jamie is a thirteen year o...
This episode in the Mary Russell series finds Russell and Holmes in San Francisco, where Russell is to attend to business related to her parents' estate. As Russell gets closer to San Francisco, she becomes increasingly disturbed by nightmares which appear to be linked to childhood events. Once ...
Getting through a series of novels with more than three or four books can be, in many ways, rather tedious. It is entirely easy to simply lose interest in the whole thing if the individual novels are unable to sustain interest, or the reader simply lacks the stamina to see the whole thing through...
The world of Mary Russell, apprentice-turned-partner of the great detective Sherlock Holmes, has long fascinated her followers. Over the course of ten Memoirs and a number of short stories, Russell has revealed much about her life—but far more has gone unexplored. Filled with new and original ma...
For years now, readers of the Russell Memoirs have wondered about the tantalizing mentions of Japan. Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes had spent three weeks there, between India (The Game) and San Francisco (Locked Rooms). The time has finally come to tell that story. It is 1925, and Mary Russell ...
Darkness gathered, but he stared on through the wind-screen, his clouds of tobacco smoke streaming out from Billy’s half-open window. After an hour, the driver gave up: if the detective wasn’t going to sleep, he might as well talk. “You buried her father that night. You and her.” Holmes turned hi...
He marched twice the length of the garden without seeing so much as a flower before he noticed what he was doing and took himself in hand: Sit down, have a smoke, and enjoy the place by daylight, he ordered himself. You won’t get to Bunsen any faster by champing at the bit. He spotted a stone ben...
Irony comes in many flavours, sweet to bitter. The harshest irony I ever tasted was this: when I was interrupted that spring morning, I felt only relief. But then, tyres on wet gravel sound nothing like the crack of doom. The noise caught me in the midst of an attack on the post overflowing my de...
has become meaningless as a description of human behavior, so laden is it now with negative emotional baggage. Any small and vaguely eccentric group of religious seekers-after-truth is apt to find itself slapped with the label and instantly converted in the minds of outsiders into a potential Peo...
King ________________________________ Copyright © 1998 by Laurie R. King All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information...
I spent the better part of the morning in the shops, assembling a wardrobe appropriate to a salesgirl or a colonel’s secretary, and most of the afternoon rendering my purchases down into a state of shabby gentility by the judicious use of too-hot water and an overheated iron, and by replacing the...