Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King

Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I genuinely like this series of memoirs from Sherlock Holmes’s late-life partner and wife, but I shake my head in bafflement over every second or third one. This is a story of amnesia and intrigue in French and Spanish Morocco in the early 1920’s. A lovely sense of place, as usual, but otherwise . . . no. There is a good book here, it’s just that this book only intersects with that one for about twenty pages. The emotional crux of the book lies neither with Holmes nor Russell, and we only get to know what it actually is in dried out retrospect, recounted in one of the endless attempts to explicate the overbaked plot into something digestible by way of everyone sitting around and talking about it for pages on end.

I mean, I respect her for trying new things, I totally do. The last book was a pirate caper, this one is a straight-faced amnesia espionage story. Just, when you try new things, sometimes they’re a miss. And at this point, I really, really, really wish this series would cough up a good old murder mystery. Remember those? Sherlock Holmes solved them? …Yeah. Me neither.




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