I’m in love with Laurie King’s “Mary Russell” books. I heard about these on (of course) some sort of NPR show, and was intrigued by these stories which centered on Mary Russell, a young woman who meets, befriends, and eventually marries Sherlock Holmes, the detective of literary fame. I ran out and got “The Beekeeper’s Apprentice” and was hooked.

King’s Mary Russell character is a young woman, about twenty, who is an orphaned American and a student at Oxford. She’s ferociously intelligent, witty, and written with a great deal of both style and empathy by King. She encouters Holmes in the first book, and develops a friendship with Holmes over the series that quickly develops into a partnership, and then a marriage. I love the alternative take on Holmes himself, as King’s Holmes is amusing in his detestation of the treatment he received at the hands of Conan Doyle. Holmes insists he’s actually quite a bit smarter than Doyle made him out to be. :-)

The books have a great sense of place about them — I thoroughly enjoyed reading “The Moor” while in London, and really wanted to get in a car and drive to the southeast to see the places King describes so well. The books are set just after World War I, and King employs a literary device to set the whole series, in that she tells of how she mysteriously received these manuscripts anonymously, and is simply editing and retelling the stories as she received them.

This latest book focuses on Mary Russell’s family, and the death of her parents that left her orphaned. Was the death of her parents an accident, for which she has been carrying guilt her entire life, or the result of foul play? Set in San Francisco, King looks back onto the events of the Great Fire that almost destroyed the city in 1906.

I’m not at all a fan of the mystery genre, but I find King to be a great writer and this series to be enormously entertaining.

Here’s the entire series at Amazon, but of course you should rush out and buy them at your local bookseller.