The queen is Marie of Roumania: the doubly royal granddaughter to Victoria, Empress of the British Empire, and Alexander II, Tsar of Russia. I hope you agree.įor a chronology of the Russell & Holmes stories, click here.Ī queen, a castle, a dark and ageless threat-the latest adventure of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. Politics, women’s rights, religious expression, governmental oppression–all these and more wander through the Russell stories, so that although they are primarily, as Graham Greene called his books, “entertainments,” they also have the real-life grit and dimension that a crime novel demands.īut mostly, I enjoy the Russells because they’re fun, for the writer and (I am led to believe) for the reader. I have learned even more about myself and my world, since a central raison d’etre of reading history, even fictional history, is that it is a mirror, reflecting unexpected sides of our times and ourselves. Seventeen books later, I have learned a great deal about Russell, Holmes, and their world. At the time, I had little knowledge of the Great War, England in the Twenties, or Sherlock Holmes, but that didn’t seem to matter to her, she just waited (graciously stifling her impatience) for me to catch up. Mary Russell walked into my life with the first line of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and took over.
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