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Island of the Mad: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes - Softcover

Buch 15 von 19: Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

King, Laurie R.

 
9780804177986: Island of the Mad: A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804177988 ISBN 13: 9780804177986
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

Laurie R. King’s New York Times bestselling series featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes is “the most sustained feat of imagination in mystery fiction today” (Lee Child)!

The last thing Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, need is to help an old friend with her mad, missing aunt. Lady Vivian Beaconsfield has spent most of her adult life in one asylum after another, since the loss of her brother and father in the Great War. Although her mental state seemed to be improving, she’s now disappeared after an outing from Bethlem Royal Hospital . . . better known as Bedlam.
 
Russell wants nothing to do with the case—but she can’t say no. To track down the vanished woman, she must use her deductive instincts and talent for subterfuge—and enlist her husband’s legendary prowess. Together, the two travel from the grim confines of Bedlam to the murky canals of Venice—only to find the shadow of Benito Mussolini darkening the fate of a city, an era, and a tormented English lady of privilege.
 
Praise for Island of the Mad
 
“Full of lush details and clever twists.”—Booklist
 
“Once again validates Laurie R. King as the preeminent Holmes writer working today.”—Bookreporter
 
“A truly memorable mystery . . . Laurie King brings her always amazing imagination to the page to enthrall readers, as only she can do.”—Suspense Magazine
 
“Superb . . . shocking . . . Come for the mystery, stay for the sightseeing, the gibes at fascism, and the heroine’s climactic masquerade as silent film star Harold Lloyd.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“There’s no shortage of entertainment. . . . If you are a fan of the series, you won’t be disappointed!”—San Francisco Book Review

“Well-plotted . . . This ranks as one of the better recent installments in this popular series.”—Publishers Weekly

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of fifteen Mary Russell mysteries, five contemporary novels featuring Kate Martinelli, the Stuyvesant & Grey novels Touchstone and The Bones of Paris, and the acclaimed standalones Lockdown, A Darker Place, Folly, Califia’s Daughters (written under the pen name Leigh Richards), and Keeping Watch. She lives on California’s Central Coast.

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Chapter One
   Sherlock Holmes and I stood shoulder to shoulder, gazing down sadly at the tiny charred corpse.
            “She should never have left us alone,” I told him.
            “She had no great choice in the matter.”
            “There’s always a choice.”
            “Strictly speaking, perhaps. But it’s best that she disappear, at least for a time. Even putting aside the death penalty, I cannot see her thriving in prison.”
            I had to agree. “She is probably better off in Monte Carlo.” And so saying, I snatched up the smouldering pan and tipped my attempt at a chicken dinner into the rubbish bin. Our long-time housekeeper, Mrs Hudson, had recently abandoned us, selfishly choosing freedom over being tried for murder—and thereby risking our lives to my poisonous culinary skills. “Cheese sandwiches, then? Or shall we walk up to the Tiger?”
            He glanced at the kitchen clock. “Do you suppose Tillie might have a table, up at the Monk’s Tun?”
            Three hours later, we were making our leisurely way towards the gate in the stone wall encircling our house. I had pocketed a torch as we left, but the midsummer sky held enough lingering brightness that we did not need it as we returned across the Sussex Downs. Tillie had outdone herself, with a perfection of cool dishes on a warm afternoon: subtle lettuces, an iced soup, cold meats, hot rolls, and a strawberry tart the likes of none in the land.
            The one drawback was, the Monk’s Tun had begun to collect a reputation. Not that I begrudged Tillie her success—although I might wish we had not chosen to stop in the same night as a carload of Young Things on their way up from Dover.
            Not that they were drunk, merely festive; nor were they loud, exactly, merely difficult to ignore. They were my age—in fact, two of them I dimly recognised: a young man with dark Byronic curls who had been the year before me at Oxford, and a girl whose face appeared in the illustrated Society pages of the newspapers. My eyes kept going to them, two sleek girls in Paris frocks, two clean, tanned lads in casually worn suits that would have cost Tillie’s barman a year of his salary.
            The second time Holmes had needed to repeat something, he craned around to look at the table of merrymakers on the other side of the old room.
            “Friends of yours?”
            “Good heavens, no.”
            “Then why are you watching them so closely?”
            “I wasn’t. Not really. Just—they seem like an alien race, down here in Sussex. Don’t you think?”
            His grey eyes fixed on me, but before he could speak, Tillie came up to greet us, and the next course arrived, and the moment was lost.
            However, Holmes never forgot anything. When he pushed open the gate an hour later, he said, “Russell, do you regret the choices you made?”
            Little point in pretending I didn’t understand. “Regret? Never. I might occasionally wonder what life would have been, had things been different, but it’s mere speculation. Like . . . like trying on a dress I’d never actually wear, just to see what it feels like.”
            He closed the gate and worked the latch. We picked our way through the grassy orchard, hearing the faint texture of sound from the hives—drones cooling their homes from the day’s heat. Near the house, the sweet odour from the old-fashioned climbing rose drew us forward.
            Mrs Hudson had planted the flower, long before I knew her. Mrs Hudson, now gone away, to . . . But before yearning could overcome me, the night was broken by the jangle of the telephone bell.
            Neither of us hurried to catch it.
            And neither of us suggested, when the machine ceased its clamour before we were halfway through the kitchen, that we ask the Exchange to restore the connection.
            Instead, Holmes pulled a corkscrew from the drawer and a bottle of chilled honey wine from the cooler. I fetched a pair of glasses from the cupboard. We left the door open, to chase away the aroma of cremated chicken, and settled into our garden chairs. The night smelled of blossoms and honey. The low pulse of waves against the Sussex cliffs obscured the sound from the hives. The wine was cool, but faintly sad as its summer freshness faded, giving a hint of bitterness to come.
            And the telephone rang again. At this time of night, the sound was ominous.
            With a sigh, I put my half-empty glass onto the stones and went through the terrace doors.
            I spoke our number by way of greeting, to be answered by a voice from the local Exchange. “Evening, Mrs Holmes, sorry to ring so late but the lady said it was an emergency, so I told her I’d keep trying you. And the girl at the Monk’s Tun said you’d left there. Do you want me to connect you again?”
            Life in a rural area is rich in many things, but privacy is not one of them. “Hold on a moment, I’ll get Holmes.” The word emergency generally summoned Sherlock Holmes.
            But to my surprise, she said the woman had asked for me.
            “Did she leave a name?”
            “She said to tell you it was Veronica Fitzwarren.”
            Ronnie. Oh dear.
            I pulled up the chair we kept near the telephone, and sat. “Yes, you’d better put me through.”
…
 

Chapter Twenty
            The train came to its end on Sunday, two days and four nations after we’d stepped out of our Sussex door.
            The ideal approach to Venice is from the sea, standing at a ship’s rails as the faint traces of buildings...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804177988
ISBN 13 
9780804177986
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
GPSR Kontakt
gpsr@libri.de

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