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Knave of Diamonds: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes - Softcover

Buch 19 von 19: Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

King, Laurie R.

 
9780593874004: Knave of Diamonds: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593874005 ISBN 13: 9780593874004
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

Mary Russell’s allegiances are tested by the reappearance of her long-lost uncle—and a tantalizing case not even Sherlock Holmes could solve.

When Mary Russell was a child, she adored her black sheep Uncle Jake. But she hasn’t heard from him in many years, and she assumed that his ne’er-do-well ways had brought him to a bad end somewhere—until he presents himself at her Sussex door. Yes, Jake is back, and with a load of problems for his clever niece. Not the least of which is the reason the family rejected him in the first place: He was involved—somehow—in the infamous disappearance of the Irish Crown Jewels from an impregnable safe in Dublin Castle.

It was a theft that shook a government, enraged a king, threatened the English establishment—and baffled not only the Dublin police and Scotland Yard, but Sherlock Holmes himself. And, now, Jake expects Russell to step into the middle of it all? To slip away with him, not telling Holmes what she’s up to? Knowing that the theft—unsolved, hushed-up, scandalous—must have involved Mycroft Holmes as well?

Naturally, she can do nothing of the sort. Siding with her uncle, even briefly, could only place her in opposition to both her husband-partner and his secretive and powerful brother. She has to tell Jake no.

On the other hand, this is Jake—her father’s kid brother, her childhood hero, the beloved and long-lost survivor of a much-diminished family.

Conflicting loyalties and international secrets, blatant lies and blithe deceptions: sounds like another case for Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurie R. King is the award-winning bestselling author of eighteen previous Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mysteries, a series featuring SFPD cold-case Inspector Raquel Laing, the contemporary Kate Martinelli series, the historical Stuyvesant & Grey stories, and five acclaimed standalone novels. She lives in Northern California, where she is at work on her next Raquel Laing mystery.

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Chapter One

Russell

Damian’s wedding was proving something of a contrast to my own.

Holmes and I had wed by night, slipping like thieves into his family’s country-house chapel on a cold winter’s eve, holding our festivities with a few cherished friends while the house’s current master was away. Appropriate, perhaps, considering the participants, but hardly boisterous.

This nuptial was halfway to riotous, a gay, tipsy crowd beneath the genial sun of a late-summer’s afternoon, with half the artists of Paris and most of the village’s residents merrily jostling elbows and glasses. Francis Picabia and Gerald Murphy had cornered the village blacksmith and seemed to be discussing anvils. Sara Murphy was writing down the recipe for one of the dishes in Mme LaRue’s open-air banquet. Pablo Picasso’s intense eyes were drilling into the unfortunately damaged face of the village postmistress, making her giggle nervously. At the far end of the garden, a jazz band was setting up while two dark-skinned American women—one a Paris nightclub owner, the other a recently-arrived chorus girl—walked through some moves the dancer had brought with her from New York.

“Charming lass,” said a voice at my side.

I looked down at one of the bride’s brothers—Hugh, was it? No, this was the youngest, Gordon, his Scots accent barely discernible under the weight of English Public School. In a group, all four brothers tended to revert: last night, the sound from the sitting room had resembled a pack of badgers gargling.

“Gordon, I hope you’re enjoying your first trip to Paris?”

“Thank you,” he said. “Indeed.”

I looked more closely, wondering if he was too terrified to speak. Then I noticed that his eyes had not moved from the musical gathering at the end of the garden, and realised that he was not actually responding to my question, merely automatically flipping words in my direction.

“Would you like to meet them?” I asked. “The musicians and ladies?”

His face instantly turned the same colour as his hair, and badger-sounds came from his throat. I put down my glass and seized his wrist, steering him through the groups to where the two Americans were laughing with the jazz band.

I planted him there, made the key introductions, then faded away and went to claim another glass.

“Who is the girl?” asked a very different voice at my side, one whose Scots accent had become delightfully touched by French in recent months—tongue shifting forward in her mouth, her rolled R’s gone soft. Every so often, her gerunds included the G sound.

“Josephine something,” I replied. “A dancer just arrived from New York, came out to join a ‘revue nègre’ in the city. She seems very sweet.”

And lest young Gordon’s older sister feel that she should be protective, three more interested males had already drifted up the garden, including a couple of American writers: Scotty Fitzgerald (whom I had met that summer) and a friend of his named Hemingway. Under their barrage of masculinity, the boy’s innocent charm hadn’t a chance. I turned to her.

“You look magnificent, Aileen.”

She glanced down at the dress. “Nice, isn’t it? I couldn’t imagine how it was going to look until it came together. Though my mother may never forgive me for not wearing the family lace.”

The gown was, literally, a work of art, a collaboration by the new husband’s colleagues and friends, panels of brocade and silks in a dozen varieties of cream embroidered over with flowered vines. I’d never seen anything like it, and even on a woman nearly a foot shorter than I, it was breath-taking.

“I’m sorry she couldn’t make it over.”

“It’s a long voyage for her, and in any event, we’ll be there in no time.”

The three Adlers were headed over to Scotland for a grandmother’s 90th birthday in early December. But not, apparently, for Christmas. A Henning family Christmas, the doctor had confided in us, was too much to demand of a new husband. It would be at least a year before she presented him with a kilt and inflicted him with a Henning familial assault by bagpipe.

“I’m glad all your brothers could come,” I told her.

She laughed. “I’m grateful Damian gets on with them. It must be quite a shock, for a man with nothing but a father—and the father’s wife, of course.”

“Don’t forget the uncle who never leaves London,” I added. Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, had predictably sent his regrets, and said that he looked forward to seeing the Adlers when they came to London for Boxing Day. His absence was probably just as well, considering the number of Topics Requiring Discussion that I was piling around his feet, like firewood at the base of a large stake.

“Do you have family, Mary? I mean to say, Damian told me that your parents and brother had died, but he didn’t know beyond that.”

“I am remarkably unburdened by relatives,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact and probably failing. “A few on my mother’s side, none of whom I get on with. My father’s parents are still alive, but they never approved of my mother—or me, really. I cut those ties when I rather dramatically left them a note and sailed off to England on my own at the age of fifteen.”

I’d walked away from my grandparents’ mansion with little more than a valise of clothes and a couple of books that I’d purchased myself: no mementos, no reminders of the life I was leaving behind. In the following years, I had built myself a new family, beginning with Holmes and Mrs Hudson, and now including Damian and his wife and child—and, I supposed, that very old woman who had appeared at the edge of the wedding ceremony before vanishing again. I was happy . . . but I did occasionally wish I felt more of an ancestral foundation beneath my feet.

“Your father was an only child?”

“Pardon? Oh, no, he had a brother. Younger.”

Aileen was studying my face. “You knew him.”

“Not as well as I’d have liked. He was . . .” I smiled. “Jake was a rogue and a ne’er-do-well, who was disowned by my grandparents when I was seven or eight. He used to send my brother and me the most peculiar and inappropriate gifts from all corners of the globe—a kit of explosive chemicals, a Maasai spear, the throwing knife I often wear. Whenever he appeared, adventures were sure to follow. Sometimes he came to escape trouble. Other times, he’d leave for the same reason. My brother and I adored him. My mother called him ‘The Knave,’ and treated him like a beloved pet that kept chewing on the furniture. My father shook his head a lot. He was the responsible one in the family.”

“What happened to your uncle?”

“He just . . . disappeared.”

My last sight of Uncle Jake had been the Christmas when I was eleven, a visit that began with Mother opening the door to a familiar figure—then taking a sharp step back when he’d thumbed up his hat-brim to reveal a spectacular black eye—and ended with a clever bit of criminality that involved two innocent minors.

The last time I’d heard from him was a brief letter that reached me on November 10, 1914. The War in Europe was raw and new, as was my own loss—father, mother, brother, all gone in an instant. I was in hospital when Jake’s...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593874005
ISBN 13 
9780593874004
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
353
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