I really love it when authors use punning titles to introduce their works. A LETTER OF MARY is so aptly named, for this novel ~ the third in the Sherlock Holmes Mary Russell series ~ opens when Mary receives a letter. It is from Dorothy Ruskin, a woman she does not know well, an emancipated, forceful woman who dresses in pantaloons and does archaeology in Palestine. But she remembers Mary from a few years back, and now she is coming to England and would like to take tea with Mary and her husband ~ the famous and brilliant sleuth Sherlock Holmes.
While visiting Russell and Holmes, Dorothy Ruskin leaves them with a Renaissance-style box which enfolds an ancient parchment. And this is really the LETTER OF MARY that the title refers to. For it seems that the parchment is truly ancient. Dating from 70 CE, when the Romans destroyed the Temple of Solomon, the author of this letter writes that she has to flee Jerusalem. But before she does so, she places this parchment in the hands of her granddaughter Rachel to take to the author’s sister, the child’s great-aunt. But what is so astonishing is that it is written in Koine, a type of Greek, by a female author, who refers to herself as Maryam or Mary of Magdala, the Apostle of Jesus the Anointed One.
As this novel is set one hundred years ago, in 1923, when women had only just achieved the vote in England and the United States, and when emancipated women were a new thing that some people were having a very hard time getting used to, Mary Russell holds back on making it public.
In the meantime, Dorothy Ruskin is killed by a runaway car, and Holmes and Russell spend the rest of the novel trying to nab her killer(s).The author has great fun in playing out the whole sleuthing thing. And like Jacqueline Winspear, the author of the Maisie Dobbs series, Laurie R. King has her characters complain about how boring and tedious the sleuthing life is compared to “the nonsense written by John Watson” or what happens in the typical novel.
If you enjoy period dramas, especially those set in the 1920s and 1930s you are in for a treat with this volume.
