Garment of Shadows by Laurie R. King offers listeners a creative plot scenario, full of depth and the sensory experience of Mary Russell as she spends time in Morocco. After five years as wife of Sherlock Holmes, Russell wakes up in a strange room and can’t figure out how she got there or even who she is. She deduces from her habits that she usually carries a gun and a knife and recognizes several languages. When she hears police arrive at the building where she is staying, she escapes and wanders around the marketplace in what she deduces to be Morocco.
Upon getting led by a bright but mute boy to Holmes, Russell attacks her husband, not recognizing him. Holmes has been consulting with Ali, the Bedouin introduced in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice while Holmes and Russell visit Palestine. With his “brother” Mahmoud, Ali serves as one of Mycroft Holmes’s intelligence agents, featured prominently in O Jerusalem. Now the agents need the help of Holmes and Russell in establishing peace talks between two competing leaders in Morocco. But can Russell regain her memory in time to help?
Garment of Shadows begins with a unique premise, and I enjoyed that part, but I would have liked to see more of her amnesia. The book description talks about the way Russell has to meet and fall in love again with Holmes, while determining whom she can trust. However, Russell regains her memory so soon that these details don’t have much opportunity to shine. I really would have liked to see more of Russell’s having to detect her own life to regain her past and make friends once again. It would have been really fun to watch her fall in love with Holmes for the second time, as I expected from the book’s description.
King is known for her sophisticated writing style, and Garment of Shadows demonstrates that clearly. She uses her well-known complex sentence structures that she still makes readable. In this book, King adds the sensory stimuli of everything around Russell and Holmes in Morocco. Readers smell the scents, taste the food, hear the local language and calls to prayer, see the colors and other sights, and touch the items unique to the community. Probably the strongest part of this book is the beautiful language and vivid imagery.
Garment of Shadows contains a lot of heavily researched historical details, which becomes both a plus and a minus. The research contributed heavily to the depth of the book, making it seem highly realistic. But on the other hand, there is so much political intrigue that the book gets convoluted and confusing at times. I had trouble following the political plot, especially because I know nothing about Morocco in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
I really enjoy the audiobook performance of narrator Jenny Sterlin. She sounds like a 20- something highly educated Englishwoman. I further like the voices that she uses and the accents of the non-British characters, in particular Mahmoud and Ali. Sterlin does a good job of making the audiobook effective and likely makes the audiobook easier to follow in its political details than a visual copy would do.
I listened to the first 11 of the audiobooks in this series before I began writing audiobook reviews, so this is the first I’m reviewing. It lacks some of the sparkle of the earlier books, especially the banter between Holmes and Russell. However, I appreciated this more than the previous few books. I give the book three stars.
Laurie R. King even has her own wikipedia page! Check it out here
You can visit her website at https://laurierking.com/.
Check her out on Twitter at @LaurieRKing.
You can read Jenny Sterlin’s web page here.
