Locked Rooms
Laurie R. King
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Just when you thought it was safe to revisit this blog, I’ve got yet another Holmes/Russell novel to review. Of the nine books in the series, so far, I have to confess that this one is my favorite because it delves into Mary’s past in San Francisco.

Locked Rooms picks up exactly where The Game left off, with Holmes and Russell on a ship en route to California, with a sojourn in Japan we don’t hear much about. This time there are no shipboard masquerades where we see Mary donning the 1920’s-equivalent of a hot school girl costume, because Mary is having nightmares. Nightmares about her childhood in San Francisco, circa the 1906 earthquake. The problem, of course, is that Mary doesn’t think she lived in SFO at that time.

It was surreal reading about Sherlock Holmes walking the streets with which I’m so familiar, and the murder mystery part of the novel was intriguing, as always. What I found so much more compelling, however, was the internal struggle Mary Russell had, between what she thinks she remembers, and the cold hard facts.

A word of caution: While many of the Holmes/Russell novels can be read out of sequence, this one really requires a working familiarity with the previous books in the series.