Locked Rooms

This is the eigth in a series of novels by Laurie R. King which features the young detective Mary Russell and her partner of literary fame Sherlock Holmes. The title comes from a recurring dream that haunts Mary of a locked room to which she holds the key. It is a series that keeps coming on strong, and this latest installment is one that faithful readers will truly appreciate. In it Mary returns to San Francisco, her childhood home, and confronts the trauma of her family's fatal car accident that only she survived. Plagued by a sense of guilt that she caused their deaths, Mary has never shared much of her past even with her husband, Sherlock Holmes. But is there something more sinister in her reticence to discuss the past? As they approach her home after ten years absence Mary becomes strangely unobservant and inwardly directed. Even when she is shot at two days after her arrival, she does not respond as she would have before. It is if she is in a cloud or hypnotic trance. Laurie King does an admirable job of recreating San Francisco of the 1906 earthquake and of the Roaring 20's. The novel is rich in period detail, and contains a cast of well-developed characters which includes the young author Dashiell Hammett who, because of poor health, is making a career change from detective work to writing detective stories. The suspense builds as first Holmes, and later Mary, begin to believe that her family was murdered to keep them from revealing something that is hidden in their old house. The book becomes a non-stop page turner as they discover that everyone associated with the family were murdered shortly after their fatal day. It seems that only Mary's departure for England right after the accident has saved her life so far. But now she is back, and she and Holmes will not sleep easy until the murderers are found. Could this be the last Mary Russell mystery? Mary has lain to rest the ghosts that seem to have driven her so far. How will she proceed with her life now that the hidden torments are finally behind her? Laurie King has decided to give Mary a vacation and her latest novel is The Art of Detection, the first new addition to her Kate Martinelli series since 2000. I am sure that Mary could use the rest. We the readers will have to wait to see if it is rest or retirement for Mary.

I've enjoyed Laurie King's variations on the Sherlock Holmes revisited them since they first started to appear. For one thing, they are written with a great deal of intelligence and wit, from the viewpoint of Mary Russell, the young wife of a much older Holmes. One quickly forgets their age difference - once the pair is mid-adventure they are true equals. Because of this, Holmes never develops the egotistical vapidity that haunts some of Doyle's imitators. Having taken the couple on a wild tour through the Middle East and Asia, Russell sends them of one what one would first expect to be calmer turf - San Francisco, where Mary was raised and where her family died in a terrible accident. It is to be a business trip, where Mary intends to see to her late father's holdings and prepare her home for sale. But things aren't that straightforward. Mary has buried all the painful memories that recall her guilt over her family's accident. Now dreams are haunting her, and, worse yet, she and Holmes have become targets in an inexplicable game. Something happened in the desperate days of the San Francisco earthquake. Something that wrought a change in her father's relationship with his handyman and gardener, and nearly destroyed his marriage. Mary struggles with her recalcitrant memory, trying to piece events together. Holmes also investigates, but, for once, Mary resents his intrusion. To her this is her problem. Holmes finds himself conducting his own clandestine investigation. Not so much into the past, but to find out why someone is trying to kill Mary. The result is a rich story, told from two separate viewpoints, full of a wealth of details about the earthquake. The tension between Mary and Holmes is kept at just the right pitch for good character development while avoiding dramatic extremes. The result is a highly successful novel that can stand on its own, if you wish. But I would recommend pursuing the whole series, where there is much to delight any fan of Sherlock Holmes.

"Locked Rooms" is Laurie King's eighth Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes mystery, and it is one of her best. After spending time in India and Japan, Holmes and his young wife set sail for San Francisco, California in 1924. The ostensible reason for their visit is so that Mary can sign papers connected with the estate left by her parents, who died ten years earlier in a tragic car crash. However, Mary has an even more urgent motive for revisiting her childhood home. She has been having disturbing nightmares, and she would like to exorcise the emotional demons that have been tormenting her. In the three years that she has been married, Mary has revealed few details about her childhood to her husband. Her past is a confusing and frightening maze that she has been extremely reluctant to navigate. Mary knows that her parents lived through the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but why does she have no memory of being with them during that time? Why does she blame herself for the accident that took the lives of her mother, father, and younger brother? Finally, what is the significance of Mary's recurring dreams about flying objects, a faceless man, and a house with locked rooms to which only she has the key? Laurie King's novel addresses these and other questions against the backdrop of one of the world's most scenic cities. The author's colorful and beautifully detailed descriptive writing brings Prohibition-era San Francisco to life, with its clanging cable cars, its wealthy mansions, and its breathtaking waterfront views. "Locked Rooms" is a multi-layered and richly textured novel. It is also a satisfying puzzle in which Russell uncovers some long buried family secrets and reexamines her assumptions about her parents' deaths. King provides a close look at the inner workings of the Holmes' unconventional marriage. In addition, "Locked Rooms" gives the reader a mini-history of the San Francisco earthquake, with a well-researched account of how this devastating event affected the city's traumatized residents. Readers will enjoy the book's deliciously complex plot as well as the large and diverse cast of characters. Among them are Mary's childhood friend, Flo Greenfield, who has become a child of the jazz age, Tom Long, the son of the faithful Chinese couple who worked for Mary's parents, and the writer Dashiell Hammett, who helps Holmes with his sleuthing. King uses an unusual narrative device that presents a dual perspective, both through Mary's eyes and the very different eyes of her husband. "Locked Rooms" has it all--an exotic locale, engrossing characters, fascinating historical background, and a suspenseful, well-told story. Fans of Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell will be delighted and entertained by this solid entry in a very successful series.

This is the 8th novel in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series created by Laurie King. After working with Rudyard Kipling's "Kim" in the last book ("The Game"), the married detective couple sail from India for their first trip to America and a trip to Mary's past. The wonderful conceit of these books is that the retired and aging Mr. Holmes has found his soulmate in a much younger American woman. Ms. King usually works either literary characters or their authors into her plot and "Locked Rooms" is no different. The father of the American crime novel, Dashiel Hammett, makes a major appearance as a Pinkerton operative in his pre-novelist days (see his "Maltese Falcon" and "The Thin Man" as representative of his writing at its best). The city of San Francisco in the 1920's becomes a character as Ms. King effectively invokes the mood of a people as they rebuild from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake. This is longest book of the series since "The Beekeeper's Apprentice" (1994) kicked it off and the most ambitious. As a murder mystery/psychological thriller, it introduces for the first time the voice of Mr. Holmes (prior books were told solely from Mary Russell's perspective). "Locked Rooms" stands on its own merits but the tale becomes richer if the reader has read the other novels to pick up on various references to their past. For other homages to the literary creation of Arthur Conan Doyle, the reader is referred to "The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes", edited with notes by Leslie Klinger (2004), to "A Slight Trick Of The Mind" by Mitch Cullen (2005), and "The Seven-Per-Cent Solution" by Nicholas Meyer (1974).

Young Mary Russell and King's version of Holmes are off to San Francisco to take care of business stemming from Russell's inheritance from her parents. Russell can't remember much of her childhood, the time she spent in San Francisco, before her father, mother and brother were killed in a car accident of which she was the only survivor. As she and Holmes are introduced to the people and relics of Russell's past, the adventure begins as the try to unravel the secrets of her past in the most personal investigation they have undertaken to date. Russell and Holmes are fun characters, brought to life by the quality of Ms. King's descriptive writing. Add to that the appearance of Pinkerton agent Dashiell Hammett, set against the vivid backdrop of San Francisco in the 1920s and this is great reading to transport you to another place. I highly recommend this book. If you haven't read the others in this series, go directly to Bee Keeper's Apprentice, and do not stop reading until you've finished Locked Rooms. Phew. I can't wait until the next one comes out.