Describe
Mary Russell here...
"I see before me one Mary Russell, named after her paternal grandmother... She is, let us see... fifteen years of age, and despite her youth and the fact that she is not at school she intends to pass the University entrance examinations... She is obviously left-handed, one of her parents was Jewish—her mother, I think? Yes, definitely the mother—and she reads and writes Hebrew. She is at present four inches shorter than her American father—that was his suit?"
—Sherlock Holmes, when faced with the same request.
Mary Russell is the protagonist of a series of detective novels by Laurie R. King based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. After her parents and brother are killed in a car crash, 15-year-old Mary returns to the family home on the Sussex Downs. There she meets Sherlock Holmes, who retired twelve years ago in 1903 and has become a beekeeper. He is surprised to find that she shares his talent for deduction, and she becomes both his friend and his apprentice. Later novels upgraded her to "wife".
So far there are 8 novels in the series, set between 1915 and 1924. In order of publication, they are:
- The Beekeeper's Apprentice. Set between 1915 and 1918, covers Holmes and Russell's first meeting and the three years she spent as his apprentice. Then a mysterious genius starts trying to kill them...
- A Monstrous Regiment of Women. Mary celebrates her 21st birthday (complete with independence from an unpleasant aunt and a large inheritance) by going out on the town. She runs into an old friend who introduces her to the charismatic Margery Childe. Margery runs the New Temple of God, a progressive, intellectual group that fascinates Mary. But somehow, the rich young women who attend keep dying and leaving Margery money...
- A Letter of Mary. An archaeologist whom Holmes and Russell met in Jerusalem appears in England with an ancient letter—which, when translated, is addressed "From Mariam, an apostle of Jesus the Anointed one, to my sister in the town of Madgala." Since nobody else would believe the letter is real, she's brought it to them—just in case. A few days later, she turns up murdered...
- The Moor. Holmes and Russell return to the site of one of his most famous cases—Baskerville Manor.
- O Jerusalem. This book takes place out of chronological order—it's a flashback to a point near the end of the first book when Holmes and Russell found it necessary to disappear for a while. Holmes's brother Mycroft suggests that, if they're leaving England anyway, they may as well make themselves useful, and sends them to Jerusalem to... actually, half the mystery in this one is what Mycroft and his Palestinian allies want.
- Justice Hall. This book takes place after The Moor, but reads more like a sequel to O Jerusalem—which is part of why O Jerusalem was published out of order. While in Palestine, two of Holmes and Russell's closest allies were Ali and Mahmoud, a pair of spies who pretend—very well, according to Holmes—to be Arabs but are actually British aristcrats. Now, several years later, they're back in England, and unless they can find another heir for the titular Justice Hall, they can never go back to Palestine.
- The Game. Mycroft Holmes summons his brother and sister-in-law to his rooms late one evening, and informs them that they're going to India to rescue a kidnapped spy. This doesn't strike Mary as particularly unusual until she reads the name on the spy's records—Kimball O'Hara, hero of Rudyard Kipling's book Kim. (She does admit that she's in no position to say "You mean he's REAL?", being married to a man most people consider a figment of an out-of-work doctor's imagination.)
- Locked Rooms. Holmes and Russell are apparently taking the long way home from India (Holmes mentions a three-week stay in Japan, which might be hinting at another flashback book later), and Russell decides to stop in San Francisco, her hometown, to settle the details of her inheritance. Between the odd wording of her father's will, the people who keep trying to kill her and the three family friends who were killed within a few months of the "accident", she soon realizes her family was murdered...
