Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes visit San Francisco, where Mary lived as a young girl. Mary needs to decide what to do with her family home and Sherlock helps her unlock the doors to her past. ( )

Eighth in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series.

Sailing from Bombay to San Francisco in order to take care of pressing business concerning the estate she inherited from her American father, Russell begins to have a series of three dreams so disturbing that she can not sleep. Holmes convinces her that one of the dreams, in which flying objects seem to be aimed at her, comes from her experience of the San Francisco earthquake and devastating fire of 1906; her parents had a home in the city. Russell insists that she was not in San Francisco during the earthquake, but at her grandparents place in Boston. Yet that dream no longer recurs after she discusses it with Holmes. The other two--one of a faceless man and the main one, of Russell showing her house to a group of people but one which has a locked door to which she has the key in her pocket--continue.

In San Francisco, Russell discovers a puzzling codicil to her father’s will. She also finds out that her psychiatrist, who helped her through the worst months after the car accident 1914 that killed her father, mother and younger brother--was murdered shortly after Russell left for England to live with her aunt and to have her fateful meeting with Holmes. Holmes is convinced that there is something mysterious and dangerous going on, but Russell scoffs, claiming that Holmes is bored and needs something to occupy his time.

This is a most unusual installment in the series, focusing as it does on Russell’s past to which other books have alluded but which has always remained unclear. It takes place in 1925 San Francisco, and explores the events of the tragic earthquake and the devastating fire of 1906. In between, it looks at the lives of Chinese immigrants to the city during that period of time through the eyes of a family whose husband worked for the Russells and who had a critical, mysterious connection with the aftermath of the fire on the Russell family. The denouement--when Russell realizes the meaning of the locked rooms of her dreams--is exciting, a typical Laurie King action-packed resolution of the plot line.

Mary Russell fans will eat this book up. Highly recommended. ( )

This is my favorite of the series. Not only do we finally piece together some of the details of Mary Russell's pre-Holmes days, there's a nicely done departure in narration that presents part of the story from Holmes' viewpoint. We also get to meet a young and appealing Dashiell Hammett...a nice characterization of the (at the time of the novel) struggling writer. ( )

Another really engaging mystery by Laurie R. King. I like both of her series. This one, with Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, is my favorite! If you like intellectual mysteries, this is for you! ( )

This is my second time reading this, the latest book in the Mary Russell series. I first met Miss Russell more than a decade ago (half my life!) when my mother put The Beekeeper’s Apprentice into my hands. Although I don’t think any of the seven succeeding novels quite lived up to the first (although number five, O Jerusalem, comes close, in my opinion), I still enjoy the series very much.

I wasn’t 100% thrilled with Locked Rooms the first time I read it. It’s different from any of the other books, because alongside Mary Russell’s usual first-person narration, there’s a third-person perspective following her husband, Sherlock Holmes. The structure works for the plot, especially as Mary is an intensely unreliable narrator over the course of most of the book. Back in her hometown of San Francisco for the first time since the death of her family a decade earlier, in 1914, she is so distracted by recurring nightmares and the void where her childhood memories should be that she fails to appreciate the danger she may be in.

I loved seeing how Holmes felt about Mary, something that’s never been explored in the series before. I’m not exactly sure what it is about Locked Rooms that makes it inferior to its prequels in my eyes; somehow, the story just doesn’t come together early enough for me to really enjoy it. I did like it better on the second re-read, though.

My overall judgement? A good, but not brilliant, addition to one of the most remarkable (and enjoyable) mystery series in print. ( )