Pirate King by Laurie R. King (a novel of suspense featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, #11). 304 p.This is a very odd book. Mary Russell, wife of Sherlock Holmes, is asked to investigate goings-on during the making of a silent motion picture: a movie about the making of a movie about The Pirates of Penzance. She travels to Lisbon with the cast and crew, working as assistant to the producer; this means her job is essentially to be the sane person who makes things happen properly. It also means she doesn't really have time to carry out her investigation. So for a large part of the book, you have Russell failing to detect anything relevant to her real purpose and being separated from Holmes. He shows up in the latter part of the book, but there's still very little interplay between the characters. And frankly, that's what I'm looking for from these books--deduction and interplay.
Don't get me wrong--it's a quite humorous book. But there's no reason whatsoever for it to be a Mary Russell book. I think I'd have enjoyed the book more if the main character had been the other British agent embedded in the cast of characters. I felt like this particular setting rather wasted the specialness of Russell and Holmes.
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