A Letter of Mary - Hardcover

‘A novel which challenges the cliches of history’
Independent

‘Laurie King’s idea... is beguiling’
Ham & High (of A Monstrous Regiment of Women)

‘King’s novel is civilized, ingenious and engrossing’
Literary Review

‘An inventive variation on the Sherlock Holmes myth’
Time Out

‘Crime fiction’s most unlikely but utterly credible romance... Laurie King is the most interesting writer to emerge on the American crime fiction front in recent years’
Val McDermid (of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice)

Intelligent, complex and richly imagined, A Letter of Mary is the third in the award-winning Laurie King series chronicling the unlikely partnership between the misogynistic Sherlock Holmes and Mary Russell, the young woman he takes on as his apprentice.

August, 1923. The quiet in the Holmes household in Sussex is shaken when Dorothy Ruskin, an amateur archaeologist from the Holy Land, appears with an exquisite inlaid box containing a scrap of ancient writing. Miss Ruskin soon dies in a traffic accident that Holmes and Mary prove was murder. But what was the motivation? Was it the little inlaid box holding the manuscript? Or the woman’s involvement in the volatile politics of the Holy Land? Or could it have been the manuscript itself – a letter seemingly written by Mary Magdalene that contains a biblical bombshell.

Beautifully written and steeped in authentic period detail, A Letter of Mary is a fascinating and intelligent read.