Search - A Letter of Mary (Mary Russell, Bk 3)

A delightful new pursuit by the Russell-Holmes duo!

Prior to her untimely death by foul play, the last action of a beloved old friend of Mary's is to place an ancient treasure in her charge. It's no less a prize than a papyrus letter in the hand of Mary Magdalene, where she is identified as a full-fledged Apostle of Jesus. Was this a prize which the killers too had sought?

Fierce in their grief for the friend who's been stolen from them, Russell and Holmes divide their forces as they go deep undercover, carefully assuming imaginative new personae in somewhat dicey environs.

Perhaps this brutal death was the work of a violent misogynist Christian, driven mad with his rage at the idea of a woman Apostle. Even now, he seems to have turned his eye upon Russell as his next prey. Yet what of the psychotic yet clever and twisty elder sister of the murder victim, in whom the death arouses neither alarm nor grief? But Mycroft, Holmes' brother who sits spiderlike at the center of the networks of political power, warns also that the departed woman was in the midst of playing a complicated political game with the competing ethnic groups beginning the modern struggle for the Holy Land.

Only minimally able to watch one anothers' backs, Russell and Holmes press grimly forward as they struggle to unravel the dark personalities (and potential murder motives) of their respective quarries...

Top notch Sherlock Holmsiana! And a great mystery, too.

From back cover:
Late in the summer of 1923, Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the illustrious Sherlock Holmes, are ensconced in their home on the Sussex Downs, giving themselves over to their studies: Russell to her theology, and Holmes to his malodorous chemical experiments. Interrupting the idyllic scene, amateur archaeologist Miss Dorothy Ruskin visits with a startling puzzle. Working in the Holy Land, she has unearthed a tattered roll of papyrus with a message from Mary Magdalene. Miss Ruskin wants Russell to safeguard the letter.
But when Miss Ruskin is killed in a traffic accident, Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer. Clearly there was more to Miss Ruskin than met the eye. But why was she murdered? Was it her involvement in the volatile politics of the Holy Land? Was it her championing of women's rights? Or was it the scroll--a deeply troubling letter that could prove to be a Biblical bombshell? In either case, Russell and Holmes soon find that solving her murder may be murder itself.

Sherlock Holmes has retired to Sussex Downs with his wife, Mary Russell. Just before total boredom sets in, Mary's friend, Dorothy Ruskin, a noted amateur archeologist working in the Middle East, pays a visit. Her subsequent "accidental" death embroils both of the Holmes in a religious mystery.

A wonderful pastiche and feminist mystery. A good read!