Garment of shadows A novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes

Laurie R. King

Sound recording - 2012

Waking up in Morocco with no memory of her identity, Mary Russell is enmeshed in the political and military uprisings of Europe, while Sherlock Holmes taps the assistance of T. E. Lawrence to restore Mary's memory and prevent a full-scale war that threatens countless lives.

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FICTION ON DISC/King, Laurie R.
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Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Historical fiction
Published
Prince Frederick, MD : Recorded Books p2012.
Language
English
Main Author
Laurie R. King (-)
Edition
Unabridged
Item Description
Title from container.
Physical Description
9 compact discs (11 hrs.) : digital ; 4 3/4 in
ISBN
9781470321369
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Mary Russell Holmes has just finished a wickedly funny stint with Fflytte Films in Morocco (Pirate King, 2011), but she is not where she should be when her husband, Sherlock Holmes, goes to meet her in Fez. In fact, as this tale opens, she does not know where or who she is, having taken a great blow to the head. From that hoary trope the hero with amnesia King fashions a deeply political and emotional narrative. It's 1924, and the French, the Spanish, and the Rif (inhabitants of a mountainous region in northern Morocco under the brothers Abd el-Krim) struggle for control of Morocco. Another pair, Ali and Mahmoud, known to Russell and Holmes from their adventures in O Jerusalem (1999), figure strongly here. With the amnesiac Russell narrating, we are plunged into her mind as she tries to recover her identity and as she finds languages and defensive skills in herself. No detail is merely atmospheric, but rather we taste and feel and touch what Russell does with sensuous clarity: the tile and wood interiors; the riot of aromas sweet and foul; the colors; and the layer upon layer of political machination. The language is incredibly rich but always precise, the history of this time in Morocco woven with a contemporary eye on the wheels within wheels. As always, the relationship between Holmes and Russell is utterly understated, yet traced with heat and light. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The last six Holmes-Russell mysteries have placed in the top 20 on the New York Times best-seller list, and the series has sold more than two million copies altogether.--DeCandido, GraceAnne A. Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes In the opening chapter of her new book, Garment of Shadows, Laurie R. King doesn't identity her first-person narrator--for a very good reason. Her heroine suffers from amnesia and doesn't know who she is (though readers will instantly recognize her as Mary Russell, young wife of the much older Sherlock Holmes, now a retired beekeeper in Sussex). King takes a risk by going for upwards of 30 pages essentially without dialogue. This could be a challenge in the hands of a less gifted writer, but King's vivid prose and attention to detail draw us into Mary's predicament, as she finds herself in Morocco, not knowing how she got there. Forced to piece together her own history through clues she discovers on her person as well as around her, Mary embarks upon an adventure involving spies and traitors that takes her and Sherlock to Morocco in 1924, during the height of the Rif revolt. King brings the city of Fez and its environs to life with her vivid portrayal of Arabic culture. Her grasp of the tenuous, prickly relations among Great Britain, France, and warring political factions in rapidly evolving Morocco is impressive. Some readers may find the chapters laying out the politics in extensive detail trying, while others may find them fascinating. King's prose is sprinkled liberally with Arabic words and phrases, and while perhaps not be to everyone's taste, they add to the color and richness of her narrative. The premise of the book, though original and intriguing, is somewhat problematic. Thrust into a complex political situation not of their own making, Mary and Sherlock remain in some essential way outside the emotional center of the story. King has to continually invent ways to draw her heroine deeper into the fray (this is definitely Mary's story; Holmes functions more or less as her very able sidekick).But King is up to the task, creating plenty of excitement in a hazardous journey Mary and Sherlock take on horseback into the desert. Perhaps the book's most gripping scene is the one in which the ever-resilient Russell uses her wiles in an attempt to escape from a dungeon where she has been left to die. The secondary characters are well drawn, including Holmes's "fifth cousin," Marechal Hubert Lyautey (a real historical figure). There is a lingering feeling that the main players in this taut tale are not Mary and Sherlock, but the Moroccans whose way of life is at stake. Though fans of previous Mary Russell books may appreciate this story more than the uninitiated reader coming to the series for the first time, King has done her homework, and this tantalizing glimpse into the life and times of a rapidly evolving Arabic society has remarkable resonance for our own uncertain times. Agent: Linda Allen, Linda Allen Literary. Carol Bugge is the author of nine published novels. Her latest, under the pen name C.E. Lawrence, is Silent Slaughter (Pinnacle, Aug.), the fourth in her Lee Campbell thriller series. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

More international intrigue awaits Sherlock Holmes and his wife, omnicompetent and unflappable Mary Russell, in 1924 Morocco. Since T.E. Lawrence has been occupied elsewhere, the French and Spanish forces who've occupied Morocco since World War I have achieved nothing but an expensive standoff. Now along comes a new complication. A pair of rebels, Mohammed bin Abd-el-Krim and his military strategist brother (actually his cousin) M'hammed, have declared the Mohammed Emir of the Rifi Republic and defied Morocco's Resident General, Marchal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey. If you're King (The Art of Detection, 2006, etc.), this volatile true-life situation demands the steady hand of Sherlock Holmes, whom Ali Hazr, a spy for His Majesty, wants to accompany Lyautey to a sit-down with the two Rifi leaders to talk peace. Holmes, naturally, thinks Russell, who's been doing some acting nearby for filmmaker Randolph Fflytte, would be an ideal interpreter for this mission. As the tale begins, however, Russell awakens from what was pretty clearly her abduction with no idea of where or who she is. Even after a generous round of adventures reunites her with Holmes, she's slow to recognize him or remember anything about their life together. That's just as well, because most of what follows is more derring-do, leading to a sequence in which Russell and Holmes are chained in the Mequinez dungeon Habs Qara; virtually all the mystification and detection, not to mention all the surprises, are saved for the final chapters, whose torrent of revelations is more dizzying than anything that's led up to them. Both Holmes and Russell are muffled, and the story requires a good deal of potted history. More likely to appeal to lovers of Morocco than lovers of Sherlock Holmes.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter One I was in bed. A bed, at any rate. I had been flattened by a steam-roller, trampled under a stampede of bison. Beaten by a determined thug. I ached, head to toe, fingers and skin. Mostly head. My skull throbbed, one hot pulse for every beat of my heart. I could see it in the rhythmic dimming of an already shadowy room. I wanted to weep with the pain, but if I had to blow my nose, my skull might split like an overripe melon. So I lay in the dim room, and watched my heart beat, and ached. Some time later, it came to me that the angle of the vague patch of brightness across the opposite wall had changed. Some time after that, an explanation slipped out between the pain-pulses: The sun had moved while I slept. A while later, another thought: Time is passing. And with that, a tendril of urgency unfurled. I could not lie in bed, I had to be somewhere. People were depending on me. The sun would go down: I would be late. Rolling onto my side was like pushing a motorcar up a hill. Raising myself up from the thin pad made me cry out--nearly black out--from the surge of pressure within my skull. My stomach roiled, my ears rang, the room whirled. I crouched for a long time on the edge of the bed. Slowly, the pounding receded. My vision cleared, revealing a snug roughly plastered room; hand-made floor tiles; a tawny herringbone of small bricks; a door of some dark wood, so narrow a big man might angle his shoulders, a hook driven into it, holding a long brown robe; a pair of soft yellow bedroom slippers on the floor--babouches, my mind provided: new leather, my nose told me. The room's only furniture was a narrow bed with a rough three-legged stool at its head. The stool served as a table, its surface nearly covered with disparate objects: in the centre stood a small oil lamp. To its left, nearest the bed, were arranged a match-box, a tiny ceramic bowl holding half a dozen spent matches, a glass of water, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles that appeared to have been trod upon. The other side of the lamp had an even more peculiar collection: a worn pencil stub, a sausage-shaped object tightly wrapped in a handkerchief, some grains of sand, and one pale stone. I studied the enigmatic display. The little bowl caused a brief memory to stir through the sludge that was my brain: As I slept, the sound of a match scratching into life would wake me; the sharp smell would bite my nostrils; faces would appear and make noises; I would say something apparently sensible; the faces would bend over the light, and with a puff, I would be back in the shadows, alone. My hand reached out, hesitated over the water, rejected it, and picked up the spectacles instead. I winced as they settled between my ears and the snug head wrap I wore, but the room came into focus. The matches also came into focus: a cheap, bright label, in French. I picked up the box, slid it open, my nose stung by the smell of sulphur. Four matches. I took one, scraped it into life, held it to the oil lamp. A spot of warmth entered the room. By its thin light, I looked down at what I wore. Drab homespun trousers and tunic. Bare feet. The clothing was clean, but not my hands. They looked as if someone had tried to wipe away a layer of some dark greasy matter, leaving stains in the deeper creases and under the nails. I stretched the left one out nearer the lamp. Motion caused the flame to throw dancing shadows across the room. When it had steadied, I frowned at the finger-nails to which I was attached. Not grease. Blood. The light of a candle/the sunshine smell of linen/the slope of ceiling/the soft throat of a young girl asleep/the blood on my hands-- The bolt of memory shocked me to my feet. I swayed, the room roaring in my ears, my eyes fixed on the flat, slope-free ceiling. Don't look down (blood on my hands)--don't think about the hand's memory of the smooth, intimate glide of sharp steel through flesh. I ventured a step, then another, towards the shuttered window. To my surprise, the latch flipped beneath my awkward fingers, and when the hinges creaked open, there were no bars. Why had I expected to be a prisoner? The brilliance was painful, even though the sky was grey with unshed rain. I lifted a hand to shade my eyes, and squinted at the view: a dirty, cobbled lane far too narrow for any motorcar. One could have passed an object between opposing windows--had there been windows. I saw only one, higher even than mine, tiny and tightly shuttered. I could see two entranceways off this diminutive alley: One had been painted with brightly coloured arabesques, long ago, and comprised a small door inside a larger one, as if the carpenter had learned his craft on castles and cathedrals. The door across from it was a single rectangle, black wood heavily studded with rusting iron circles the size of my thumb-nail. Around them, grubby whitewash, a fringe of grass on the rooflines, chunks of plaster flaking from walls that bulged and slumped. In one place, wooden braces thirty feet from the ground kept two buildings from collapsing into each other. The house I was in seemed to be the lane's terminus; thirty feet away, beneath the slapdash web of braces, the passageway turned to the right and disappeared. I pushed the shutters wider open, intending to lean out and examine the face of the building below me, then took a step back as the left-hand door came open and a woman emerged. She was swathed head to toe in pale garments, with a straw bag in one hand and a child's hand in the other. She glanced down the alleyway, her eyes on a place well below me, and I could see her brown, Caucasian features and startling blue eyes. She pulled her scarf up over her face and tugged the child down the lane, vanishing around its bend. Arabic; French; woman in a robe--djellaba, the internal dictionary supplied, although that did not seem quite right. Those clues combined with the woman's Berber features suggested that I was in North Africa. Algeria or perhaps Morocco. In a suq. The knowledge of where was just beyond my grasp, like an elusive name on the tip of one's tongue. Similarly, how I came to be here. And what had been so urgent it drove me to my feet. Or why I had blood on my hands. Or, my name. Who the hell was I? Chapter Two Sweat broke out all over my body, despite the cold of the room. There was a good explanation, for everything. One that I would remember in a minute, once I could think around the pounding in my head. Or . . . I turned to consider the narrow door. The shutters hadn't been locked. Yes, the window was high and the drop to the lane sheer, but perhaps it meant that my situation was not the source of that feeling of urgency. That the water in the glass was not drugged. That the door led to assistance, to information. To friends, even. My bare feet slapped across the cold tiles. I stopped beside the bed, transferring everything but the lamp, water, and bowl into my pockets, then moved over to the door and put my ear to the crack: nothing. My fingers eased the iron latch up until the tongue came free; the wood shifted towards me. I was not locked in. The odours that washed over me threatened to turn my stomach over. Frying oil, onions, chicken, a panoply of spices--for some reason, I felt that if I were more experienced with their names, I would be able to identify each individual element of that sensory cloud. I pushed aside the evidence of my nostrils, concentrating instead on my vision. The scrap of corridor was no more revealing than the view from the window: the same rough herringbone on the floor, cobalt-and-cream tiles halfway up the walls, with crisp whitewashed plaster above; another door; a tidy stack of straw baskets; the suggestion of a house off to the left. I took a step out: To my right, a stone stairway curled upward out of view--to the roof, I felt, although I could not have said why. Then I heard a voice--two voices, so distant, or behind so many doors, that I could not determine the language, much less the words. But I could hear the tension. For some reason, I reached around to the back of my waist-band, my fingers anticipating a cold weight nestled against my spine, but there was nothing. After a moment's consideration, I drew a breath, and stepped out. Nothing happened. I crept down the hall to the left and took up a position just before the bend, not venturing my head into the open. The voices were clearer now, the rhythms suggestive of Arabic. Cool air moved across my face and the light around the corner was daylight, not lamps, as if the walls of the house had been sliced away. Words trickled into my mind. Dar: a house of two or three storeys built around a ground-level courtyard, open to the sky; halka: its wide central sky-light; riad: a house whose inner courtyard was a garden. Another brief internal flash: clipped green rectangle/rain-soaked brick walls/figures in academic gowns/the odour of learning-- I was gathering myself for a step towards that light when a harsh sound juddered through the house, coming from below and behind me at the same time. I hurried back into my tiny cell and across the tiles to peer downwards into the narrow lane-- Soldiers! No mistaking that blue uniform and cap: two armed French soldiers, pounding on the door below. Aimless urgency blew into open panic: I could not be taken by them, it was essential that I remain free, that I get to-- To where? To whom? But while I might have given a single gendarme the benefit of the doubt, armed soldiers could only be a declaration of war. I snatched the robe from the hook, stepped into the slippers, and made for the curve of steps leading up. The upper door's iron latch opened easily. Outside was a terrace roof around an iron-work grid, open to the house below. On one side was strung a bare laundry line; the furniture consisted of six pots of winter-dead herbs and a pair of benches. The rooftop was empty--had I known it would be?--but it smelt of rain, the drips on the clothes-line showing that it had been recent. The air was very cold. I worked the robe over my head--it was like a sack with a hood, and to my relief smelt only of wool and soap. I picked up the stick supporting the centre of the clothes-line and brought down one slippered foot on its centre, snapping it in two; jamming the sharp end beneath the door would slow pursuit. And the rope itself--that would be useful. I reached for my ankle, but found only skin where my fingers seemed to expect a knife. Neither knife nor handgun: not friends, then. I abandoned the line to make a quick circuit of the rooftop, keeping well clear of the open grid, lest someone looking up see me. All around lay a tight jumble of buildings, their rooftops--squared, domed, and crenellated; brick and stone and tile; crisply renovated or crudely patched or on the point of collapse--at a myriad of levels, like the world's largest set of children's blocks. The town covered slopes dropping into a valley; higher hills, green with winter rains, lay in the distance. Here and there, tree-tops poked up between the structures, but there was no discernable break for roads, and the buildings were so intertwined that they appeared to be resting atop one another. Certainly they were holding each other upright--I had seen that from the window below. Several green-roofed minarets sticking above the architectural confusion confirmed that I was in North Africa. As I circled the rooftop, my fingers automatically laid claim to a few small items left by the women-folk whose territory this was--a pocket-mirror with cracked glass, a tiny pot of kohl, a pair of rusting scissors too delicate to part the laundry rope--and automatically thrust them through the djellaba's side-slits to the pockets beneath. The circuit ended, I was faced with a decision: The easiest descent was the most exposed; the most surreptitious way might well kill a person with a head as dizzy as mine. I looked out over the town, where a faint suggestion of emerging sun was bringing an impression of warmth to the grey, tan, and whitewashed shapes. Weeds sprouted on every flat surface, and storks' nests. Weren't those supposed to be good luck? I hoped so. The town's overall texture had an almost tactile satisfaction that reminded me of something. Something I had seen, touched--honeycomb! But not comb neatly bounded by a wooden frame: wild honeycomb, with orderly hexagons filling up the bumps and hollows of rock or tree. My eyes squinted, making the town blur; the aroma of honey seemed to rise up . . . Stop: time for decisions, not distractions. I went to the low wall overhanging a neighbour's house--then ducked down as a door twenty feet away scraped open and two women came out, arguing furiously in a language I did not know. As I vacillated between waiting for this safer route and risking the other, the door behind me rattled. Without further consideration, I scurried across the rooftop, pushed through a narrow gap, and dropped down to a wall-top eight feet below. My earlier glance had shown me a glimpse of tiled courtyard through the branches of an orange tree, with this foot-thick wall separating it from a derelict garden next door. I settled my yellow babouches onto the weedy bricks, fixed my gaze on the vestigial window-sill twenty feet away, then balanced like a tight-rope walker across the ragged surface to the abandoned building beyond. Fearful of pursuit, I stepped over the gap and inside--and my heart instantly seized my throat: The brick walls bled light like lace-work; the floor was mostly missing. The entire structure seemed to sway with the addition of my weight. I stood motionless until bits of mortar and wood stopped drifting down. The breath I took then was slow, but fervent. Moving with extreme caution, I drew the hand-mirror from my inner pocket and, keeping it well away from the light, held it up to reflect the rooftop behind me. The soldiers came into view. Excerpted from Garment of Shadows: A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes by Laurie R. King All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.