Mary Russell #19
At Damian Adler’s wedding Mary Russell thinks she sees a familiar figure in the crowd, someone who looks like her uncle Jake. But Jake is dead, isn’t he? She last saw her wayward uncle 14 years ago and only remembers that the charming rogue was cast out of the family shortly before her parents and brother were killed in an auto accident.
As Mary looks forward to recovering from their adventures in the previous two books, Mycroft Holmes summons his brother Sherlock to London. The case? A cold case involving the theft of the so-called Irish Crown Jewels 14 years before: a case Holmes could not solve, a theft that cost him the wrath of the Dublin police and the King. That 14 years is no coincidence and Holmes immediately recalls the unproveable involvement of Jake Russell in the theft. Should he tell Mary the truth about her beloved (and apparently dead) uncle?
Mary is only slightly surprised when Uncle Jake shows up asking her to help him recover the missing Irish Crown Jewels. How can she? To do so would place her at odds with her husband and detecting partner and his formidable brother. On the other hand, Mary has fond memories of her uncle and has hardly any family left. Which bond is stronger, that with her husband or the one with her uncle?
The plot is told through alternating chapters from Mary, Jake, and Holmes’s point of view. The plot tension is a result of Mary’s desire to help her uncle, Holmes’s desire to stay out of the cold case, and Jake’s desire to find the missing jewels. Their narratives are distinctively voiced and it’s fun to see how their conflicting loyalties play out.
After two books abroad, it’s good to see Russell and Holmes back in England and Ireland. I had forgotten about Mrs. Hudson’s departure and had to read the recaps of The Murder of Mary Russell (2016) and Riviera Gold (2020) to refresh my memory. The missing Mrs. Hudson problem is settled in a surprising way by the end of the book – along with the missing Irish Crown Jewels, of course. The solution is clever and surprising but fitting and it’s fun to see how King handles the situation.
I didn’t recall hearing of the Irish Crown Jewels before this book, so I looked them up. Yup, real! And, more intriguingly, actually stolen and unrecovered. The part I can’t believe I forgot is that the story is part of the Holmes cannon: “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” collected in His Last Bow by Sir Aurthur Conan Doyle. Prior to King including them in this story, King encountered them in “The Irish Crown Jewels” by Michael Scott in Echoes of Sherlock Holmes, an anthology she edited with Leslie S. Klinger in 2016. It’s clever how she takes these ideas and gives them her own, more complicated, twist.
Readers of this series will probably enjoy Russell and Holmes’s back-in-the-UK book as much as I did. New readers might be a bit bewildered and should probably start with the first book in the series, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. — Cathy Akers-Jordan