The Moor

The Barnes & Noble Review March 1998 “The great marvel of King’s series is that she’s managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes’s character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy, and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart.” —The Washington Post Die-hard Sherlock Holmes fans don’t take tampering with their beloved sleuth lightly, which makes Laurie King’s Mary Russell series all the more extraordinary, as it has been embraced and praised by fans and critics alike. In re-creating Sherlock Holmes in previous books as an adjunct to her chief protagonist, Mary Russell, King has set the couple’s adventures in a milieu consistent with her own creation and, although true to the place and period, independent of Conan Doyle’s work. Now, delightfully, she revives faint echoes of Doyle in bringing the Holmeses back to Dartmoor and the scene of one of the Great Detective’s classic cases, which involved “the footsteps of a giant hound.” Holmes has been invited by his old friend the Reverend Baring-Gould to look into not only an unexplained death but also, more important in the ancient cleric’s mind, sightings of a phantom coach on the moor — possibly inhabited by a phantom noblewoman and accompanied by some phantom dogs. Holmes, in turn, pulls Mary from her studies at Oxford, enlists her in the quest, and finds himself taking a second seat to her endeavors. True to their expectations of the forbidding and difficult moor, the eerie rumors have a real-world explanation, but it is one that combines more wild emotion, surprise, and frighteningsuspensethan any ghost story could. With wit and imagination, national bestseller Laurie R. King continues to remold and reinvent a crime-fiction legend and establish Mary Russell Holmes as a legend in her own time.