Locked Rooms: A Mary Russell Mystery: Rating: 1 star

Russell and Holmes go to San Francisco to dig up her past, and I go get my motorcycle and look for a shark to jump over.

Locked Rooms (Laurie R. King)
Written by Laurie R. King
Fiction · Mystery
Reviewed June 25, 2007

I’d been off the Mary Russell series for awhile, but thanks to The Game I was finally getting back into it… and then along comes the depressingly bad Locked Rooms. I should have been warned by the plot summary — Mary Russell and husband Sherlock Holmes return to her childhood home and conveniently uncover piles of clues suggesting that her parent’s accidental death was, well, not accidental — but I chose to read it anyway, and got exactly what I deserved for my stupidity. The writing, as usual, is above average — no one can claim that King can’t wield a pen — but, unfortunately, the author’s gift for words is lost in a muddled plot. It’s never a good sign when an author chooses to take a series backwards instead of forwards, especially when said author is trying to eke the last little drop of mystery out of a character who’s already bogged down with more mystery than she can handle. It’s an even worse sign when an author can’t maintain the usual first-person narration that has been a hallmark of the series, and instead turns to a mysterious, anonymous “recently-discovered manuscript” that conveniently explains (in omniscient narration, of course) the gaps in the main character’s tale. Such a narrative device helped bring down the once-excellent Amelia Peabody series, and I foresee the same sad fate befalling this series. Let us all have a moment of silence for the once-great Mary Russell series… and then let’s find something better to read.