The Murder of Mary Russell

February 15, 2016
Edgar-winner King’s subpar 15th Mary Russell novel (after 2015’s Dreaming Spies) opens on a quiet morning in Sussex in May, 1925. Against her better judgment, Mary, the independent wife of Sherlock Holmes, admits a stranger to her cottage, who says he’s Samuel Hudson, the son of her housekeeper and surrogate mother, Clara Hudson. Her misgivings prove warranted when he confronts her with a gun. Clara returns home to find Mary missing, a pool of blood on the floor, and the smell of gunpowder in the air. With Mary’s fate unresolved, the focus shifts to Clara, the daughter of a criminal implicated in Holmes’s very first case. Mary and Holmes fade into the background amid some florid prose (“I looked into his pale eyes, the bones of my chest cringing away from thirteen grams of leaden death”). This atypical entry will appeal mostly to longtime series fans. Agent: Linda Allen, Linda Allen Literary Agency.