نامه‌ای از ماری (ماری راسل #۳)

SUMMARY: Late in the summer of 1923, Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the illustrious Sherlock Holmes, are ensconced in their home on the Sussex Downs, giving themselves over to their studies: Russell to her theology, and Holmes to his malodorous chemical experiments. Interrupting the idyllic scene, amateur archaeologist Miss Dorothy Ruskin visits with a startling puzzle. Working in the Holy Land, she has unearthed a tattered roll of papyrus with a message from Mary Magdalene. Miss Ruskin wants Russell to safeguard the letter. But when Miss Ruskin is killed in a traffic accident, Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer. Clearly there was more to Miss Ruskin than met the eye. But why was she murdered? Was it her involvement in the volatile politics of the Holy Land? Was it her championing of women's rights? Or was it the scroll--a deeply troubling letter that could prove to be a Biblical bombshell? In either case, Russell and Holmes soon find that solving her murder may be murder itself.

The third book in the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series.

It is 1923. Mary Russell Holmes and her husband, the retired Sherlock Holmes, are enjoying the summer together on their Sussex estate when they are visited by an old friend, Miss Dorothy Ruskin, an archeologist just returned from Palestine. She leaves in their protection an ancient manuscript which seems to hint at the possibility that Mary Magdalene was an apostle—an artifact certain to stir up a storm of biblical proportions in the Christian establishment. When Ruskin is suddenly killed in a tragic accident, Russell and Holmes find themselves on the trail of a fiendishly clever murderer. Brimming with political intrigue, theological arcana, and brilliant Holmesian deductions.

Kirkus Reviews

Oxford theologian Mary Russell, now living quietly in Sussex with her husband Sherlock Holmes, is thunderstruck with the explosive potential of a document her old acquaintance, amateur archeologist Dorothy Ruskin, brings her from a dig in Palestine: a letter from one Mariam of Magdala identifying herself as an apostle of Jesus. What would the Church say to the possibility of a woman having been a full-fledged apostle? What might the letter do for our understanding of Mary Magdalene? And what to make of the persistently unvoiced parallels between Russell and her storied progenitor? Soon after leaving Russell and Holmes, Dorothy Ruskin is killed in a traffic accident her hosts prove was murder as they fall into a scramble for Miss Ruskin's meager possessions—and into a long, keen disappointment for fans of King's distinctively feminist Sherlockian pastiches (A Monstrous Regiment of Women, 1995, etc.). Plotting has never been King's strong suit (as it never was Conan Doyle's), but, here, her episodic story—Russell and Holmes going as spies into the houses of suspects whose personalities pale before the richness of the inspectors' before allowing Holmes to produce one of his most gratuitous final coups—is surprisingly unworthy of her richly suggestive premise.

Fans will find all of King's accustomed literacy and empathy on display. But, like Amanda Cross, she seems bent this time on crossing the line from the detective story to the discursive essay. Even Holmes is muffled.

August 1923. All is quiet in the Holmes household in Sussex as Mary Russell works on academic research while Sherlock Holmes conducts malodorous chemistry experiments. But the peace quickly disappears as out of the past comes Dorothy Ruskin, an amateur archeologist from the Holy Land, who brings the couple a lovely inlaid box with a tattered roll of stained papyrus inside. The evening following their meeting, Miss Ruskin dies in a traffic accident that Holmes and Mary soon prove was murder. But what was the motivation? Was it the little inlaid box holding the manuscript? Or the woman's involvement in the volatile politics of the Holy Land? Or could it have been the scroll itself, a deeply troubling letter that seems to have been written by Mary Magdalene and that contains a biblical bombshell .. An archeologist on a dig in 1920s Palestine discovers a letter purporting to come from a woman who was an apostle of Christ. A sensational document. When on her return to England the archeologist is murdered, sleuth Mary Russell decides to find out why.