About the Author

Laurie King is a third-generation native of San Francisco, but since her marriage to an Anglo-Indian profesor she has lived briefly on five continents. She and her husband have two children and now live mostly in California.

Reviews

'There's no resisting the appeal of King's thrillingly moody scenes of Dartmoor and her lovely evocations of its legends.' New York Times Book Review 'King not only provides a suitably generous array of things that go bump in the night, but suplies an explanation for all the skullduggery... that's at least as ingenious and plausible as Conan Doyle's own.' Booklist. 'The great marvel of King's series is that she's managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes's character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart' Washington Post

'There's no resisting the appeal of King's thrillingly moody scenes of Dartmoor and her lovely evocations of its legends.' New York Times Book Review 'King not only provides a suitably generous array of things that go bump in the night, but suplies an explanation for all the skullduggery... that's at least as ingenious and plausible as Conan Doyle's own.' Booklist. 'The great marvel of King's series is that she's managed to preserve the integrity of Holmes's character and yet somehow conjure up a woman astute, edgy and compelling enough to be the partner of his mind as well as his heart' Washington Post

Young Mary Russell (A Monstrous Regiment of Women, St. Martin's, 1995) drops everything to join husband Sherlock Holmes in Devonshire, where the pair investigate an ancient family curse near the scene of The Hound of the Baskervilles‘published some 20 years earlier. The forbidding moor nearby provides them both danger and inspiration. Excellent work.

On Dartmoor, a man lies dead beside "the footprints of a very large dog." Sound familiar? Yes, Sherlock Holmes is tracking the Hound of the Baskervilles again, some 20 years later with his wife, Mary Russell, whom King has so ably placed beside Holmes in such novels as A Letter of Mary and The Beekeeper's Apprentice. As a narrator, Russell is both more analytical and humorous than Watson. Still, the moor's eerie gloom pervades this sharp yet respectfully nostalgic update of Conan Doyle's classic novella. The elderly, eccentric Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould asks his friend Holmes to investigate the murder, as well as sightings of a ghostly carriage drawn by headless horses accompanied by a gigantic hound. In the constant fog and bone-chilling rain, Holmes and Russell tramp the muddy moors interviewing delightful characters. The new owner of Baskerville Hall, a mysterious, wealthy American, is the obvious villain, although it takes all the detectives' skills to determine his motives. This effort is slightly hobbled by the slow coalescence of its subplots. But King, always a fluent writer, is a wonder at combining the original "Hound" tale with a real person (Baring-Gould) and modern themes (land fraud) into a new, captivating story. (Jan.)