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| Garment of Shadows |
Laurie R. King’s Garment of Shadows contains the continuing adventures of Mary Russell and her husband, the famous Sherlock Holmes. It picks up immediately after the last book, Pirate King, left off. We’re still in Morocco in 1924. But this time, instead of dealing with the murderous machinations of a film crew Russell and Holmes are dealing with a three sided war between French and Spanish colonials and Moroccan freedom fighters. And, to complicate matters, Russell has taken a blow to her head that has robbed her of her memories.
Even without her memories, Russell is resourceful. She manages quite well until her husband tracks her down. So well, in fact, that she takes him for an attacker and throws him into a wall before he can tell her who she is. Fortunately, her memories start to come back as she and Holmes begin to investigate what happened. All they know at the beginning is that Russell walked into the desert with their friend Mahmoud Hazr. Russell is hit by a car and Mahmoud is missing. Mahmoud’s brother, Ali, turns up and reveals that he and Mahmoud were up to their eyeballs in diplomatic intrigue and setting up negotiations between the Moroccan freedom fighters and the French.
This book breezed by. Once I sorted out the rather confusing timeline at the beginning of the book, I was hooked by the intrigue. King spends a lot of time at the book dashing back and forth over the space of a week and it takes a bit of thought to work out when Russell and her friend Marsh disappeared, when Holmes visited Fez, when Russell and Holmes found each other again, etc. etc. I could chalk this up to this being an advance copy, but this goes beyond a few errors in the text–which I also found. At any rate, after the first few chapters, the book picks up speed and it’s not long before we have hidden traitors, ancient dungeons, and ambushes. This is one of the better books in the series, for me, because Russell and Holmes are playing for big stakes.
In fact, what starts as a better than usual mystery turns into a story with deeper meaning by the end. I’m going to do my best to write about this without giving away too much in terms of plot details, since this book won’t be out for more than a month. In the earlier books in the series, Russell and Holmes and their various allies have served the interests of Britian–and more particularly of Mycroft Holmes–without question. But in recent books, Russell has started to wonder if the Mycroft’s version of what’s right and what’s actually right are the same thing. Russell has started to object to Mycroft’s version of the greater good. In Garment of Shadows, this questioning has spread to other characters. This line of questioning has always interested me, because I am a reluctant patriot myself.
Fans of the Russell and Holmes series, you will absolutely want to read this one. I’m looking forward to the next book. And because I had an advance copy, I have even longer to wait for it than everyone else.