tamaranth | 2022/45: Garment of Shadows -- Laurie R. King

2022/45: Garment of Shadows -- Laurie R. King

Ali snorted. ‘Amnesia! We seem to have entered an Ethel Dell novel.’
‘You don’t believe me?’ I demanded.
Holmes said, ‘You must admit, Russell, amnesia is more commonly found in fiction than it is in real life. And to have you of all people living out a lady’s—’ [p. 94]

Morocco, 1924. A woman wakes up in a strange room, wearing a man's clothes, with blood on her hands. There are soldiers at the door: she flees into the twisting streets of the city, and finds herself adept at pick-pocketing, lock-picking and other handy skills.

Meanwhile, Sherlock Holmes is trying to ascertain the whereabouts of his wife, who has disappeared without trace from the film location where she was last seen. (I think this was where Pirate King, which I read a decade ago, left off.)

There's a lot of historically-accurate detail about the Rif rebellion, and the political maneouvring of the English, the French and the Moroccans: there are coded messages, written and verbal, and secret assassins, and plucky teenagers running errands. There are old friends, and some excellent new characters. And yet, and yet: it didn't draw me in as King's novels used to. I remember finding Pirate King pretty disappointing too, after the intricacies of previous novels. Perhaps my tastes have changed?

But I liked this enough -- liked the familiarity, the Russell/Holmes relationship, the evocation of the world a century ago -- to pick up the next in the series, Dreaming Spies, which I'd acquired a while back.