What do You think about Locked Rooms (2006)?
I greatly enjoyed this, and decided to give this full marks. The series is basically Sherlock Holmes fanfic, with the great detective given a female romantic and professional partner. So many ways it could have gone wrong, but I never have felt King's creation Mary Russell was a Mary Sue--for all her capabilities she has had her vulnerabilities, and I think this installment is among the most personal and introspective of the books, and I loved that aspect. One thing I've enjoyed about the books so far, and this is the eighth of them, is that King keeps changing things up so they're fresh. Even the narrative technique is different in this one, consisting not only of Russell's first person narrative, but third person from other perspectives. And, as usual--and it's infectious--you can tell King has a blast with these, this one perhaps more than usual. The Moor has the Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles for its basis. The Game was set in India under the British Raj and was a homage to Kipling's Kim. This one takes place in 1924 San Francisco. King is a California native and resident and she even slips an ancestor who survived the famous 1906 quake into the narrative as a character. She writes San Francisco with evident affection, and even included Dashiell Hammett, the one time Pinkerton Agent and mystery writer, as a character. There's even a playful reference to Conan Doyle, Holmes' creator... er, I mean biographer. This novel isn't quite the favorite some of the other Russell novels have been--The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Letter of Mary and Justice Hall--but boy was this a pleasure. It was a treat in particular to get more of Holmes from his own perspective.
—Lisa (Harmonybites)
Satisfying sleuthingLuckily for me, Locked Rooms was a book club selection or I might never have discovered this delightful series of novels featuring Sherlock Holmes and his young wife Mary Russell. This book is the eighth book in the series, but it isn't necessary to have read any of the previous books to enjoy this one.Evidently, Mary was a student of Holmes who eventually became his apprentice and then his wife. They have been traveling around the world with mysteries and misadventures finding them at every turn.This book finds them in San Francisco where Mary's family lived part-time during her childhood. There are many interesting details about the 1906 earthquake, early Chinatown, the practice of feng shui, Dashiell Hammett, California Highway 1 and many other points of interest.I thoroughly enjoyed the book and plan to go back to the beginning of the series.
—Peggy Walker
Books 4-8 of that series where young woman meets, studies with, and eventually marries Sherlock Holmes. I'm . . . ambivalent.Good things" Pretty writing. Good research. Not infrequent veins of emotional or intellectual or historical richness. Commercial derivative fiction that's actually interesting!The bad: not always succeeding in that admittedly hard task of writing about historical people and their views on race and gender while neither alienating modern readers or being anachronistic. (These books fail in both directions, on different occasions).But the greatest sin of all is that, right up to Locked Rooms, Sherlock freaking Holmes was about as dull and sanitized as he could get. I mean, she started by virtually hand waving the drug addiction, but apparently all his quirkiness and baggage went, too. I mean, Sherlock Holmes! You have to try to make him uninteresting. That does get better in the last book
—Lightreads
