That autumn, in one of those flukes that even the statistician will admit happens occasionally, it seemed for a while that every case the Homicide Department handled involved kids. A two-year-old with old scars on his back and broken bones in various states of mending died in an emergency room from having been shaken violently by his eighteen-year-old mother. Three boys aged sixteen to twenty died from gunshot wounds. Four bright seventeen-year-old students in a private school did a research project on explosives, using the public library, and sent a very effective pipe bomb to a hated teacher. It failed, but only because the man was as paranoid as he was infuriating. A seven-year-old in a pirate costume was separated from his friends on Halloween; he was found the next morning, raped and bludgeoned to death. Kate saw two of her colleagues in tears within ten days, one of them a tough, experienced beat cop who had seen everything but still couldn't bring himself to look again at the baby in the cot. The detectives on the fourth floor of the Department of Justice made morbid jokes about it being the Year of the Child, and they either answered the phone gingerly or with a snarl, according to their personalities. …
“Like a slow-burning fire, the story makes you hurt deeply for King's characters before you realize what's happening to you.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
—————
A LETTER OF MARY
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
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.
The next day, The Times arrived at one o'clock in the afternoon. It still lay folded when I turned off the lights and went upstairs, and it had not moved when I came back through the house on Friday for an early cup of tea. Two hours later, Holmes came down for breakfast and picked it up absently as he passed. So it was that nearly forty hours had elapsed between the time I saw Miss Ruskin off on the train and the time Holmes gave a cry of surprise and sat up straight over the paper, his cup of tea forgotten in one hand.
“What is it? Holmes?” I stood up and went to see what had caught his attention so dramatically. It was a police notice, a small leaded box, inserted awkwardly into a middle page, no doubt just as the paper was going to press.
IDENTITY SOUGHT OF LONDON
ACCIDENT VICTIM
Police are asking for the assistance of any person who might identify a woman killed in a traffic accident late yesterday evening. …
I sat down heavily next to Holmes.
“No. Oh surely not. Dear God. What night would that have been? Wednesday? She had a dinner engagement at nine o'clock.”
In answer, Holmes put his cup absently into his toast and went to the telephone. After much waiting and shouting over the bad connexion, he established that the woman had not yet been identified. The voice at the other end squawked at him as he hung up the earpiece. I took my eyes from Miss Ruskin's wooden box, which inexplicably seeemed to have followed me downstairs, and got to my feet, feeling very cold. My voice seemed to come from elsewhere.
“A wonderful book, simultaneously inventive, charming, witty, and suspenseful. I loved it.”—Elizabeth George
—————
THE MOOR
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
Though theirs is a marriage of true equals, when Sherlock Holmes summons his wife and partner Mary Russell to the eerie scene of his most celebrated case, she abandons her Oxford studies to aid his investigation. But this time, on Dartmoor, there is more to the matter than a phantom hound. Sightings of a spectral coach carrying a long-dead noblewoman over the moonlit moor have heralded a mysterious death, the corpse surrounded by oversize paw prints. …
The telegram in my hand read:
RUSSELL NEED YOU IN DEVONSHIRE. IF FREE TAKE EARLIEST TRAIN CORYTON. IF NOT FREE COME ANYWAY. BRING COMPASS.
HOLMES
To say I was irritated would be an understatement. We had only just pulled ourselves from the mire of a difficult and emotionally draining case and now, less than a month later, with my mind firmly turned to the work awaiting me in this, my spiritual home, Oxford, my husband and longtime partner Sherlock Holmes proposed with this peremptory telegram to haul me away into his world once more. With an effort, I gave my landlady's housemaid a smile, told her there was no reply (Holmes had neglected to send the address for a response—no accident on his part), and shut the door. I refused to speculate on why he wanted me, what purpose a compass would serve, or indeed what he was doing in Devon at all, since when last I had heard he was setting off to look into an interesting little case of burglary from an impregnable vault in Berlin. I squelched all impulse to curiosity, and returned to my desk.
Two hours later the girl interrupted my reading again, with another flimsy envelope. This one read:
ALSO SIX INCH MAPS EXETER TAVISTOCK OKEHAMPTON, CLOSE YOUR BOOKS. LEAVE NOW.
HOLMES
Damn the man, he knew me far too well.
“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.”—The Washington Post Book World
—————
A DARKER PLACE
Called “one of the most original talents to emerge in the 90's” by Kirkus Reviews, award-winning author Laurie R. King delivers a terrifying drama of good and evil, unlike any she has written before. …
A respected university professor, Anne Waverly has a past known to few: Years ago, her own unwitting act cost Anne her husband and her daughter. Fewer still know that this history and her academic speciality— alternative religious movements—have made her a brilliant FBI operative. Four times she has infiltrated suspect communities, escaping her own memories of loss and carnage to find a measure of atonement. Now, as she begins to savor life once more, she has no intention of taking another assignment. Until she learns of more than one hundred children living in the Change movement's Arizona compound. …
You don't think that hauling a middle-aged professor of religion out of her ivory tower and into the field to investigate a cult is a little unusual?”
“I wouldn't use the word ‘cult’ in her hearing if I were you,” Glen McCarthy suggested. “Not unless you're interested in a twenty-minute lecture on the difference between cult, sect, and new religious movement.”
Gillian Farmer was not to be diverted. “It still sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, not at all like a setup the FBI would come within a mile of.”
“The bureau has changed since the days of J. Edgar. Now we do whatever works.”
“And you think this will work?”
“It has three times before.”
“And, as I understand it, once it didn't. People died.”
“We were too late there—the final stages were already in motion before Anne could work her way in. I don't think even she can still feel much guilt about that one.”
“Why on earth does she do it?” Gillian demanded. “Undercover work has got to be the most nerve-racking job in the world, and she's not even a cop.”
But the man from the FBI was not ready to answer that question.
“A nail-biter thriller.”—The New York Times Book Review
O JERUSALEM
A Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Mystery
In 1918, Russell and Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes's enigmatic brother, Mycroft, and find themselves at the s
ervice of two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. A rash of murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the gully where it occurred. His findings will lead him and Russell into mortal danger.
The skiff was black, its gunwales scant inches above the waves. Like my two companions, I was dressed in dark clothing, my face smeared with lamp-black. The rowlocks were wrapped and muffled; the loudest sounds in all the night were the light slap of water on wood and the rhythmic rustle of Steven's clothing as he pulled at the oars.
Holmes stiffened first, then Steven's oars went still, and finally I too heard it; a distant deep thrum of engines off the starboard side. It was not the boat we had come on, but it was approaching fast, much too fast to outrun. Steven shipped the oars without a sound, and the three of us folded up into the bottom of the skiff.
The engines grew, and grew, until they filled the night and seemed to be right upon us, and still they grew, until I began to doubt the wisdom of this enterprise before it had even begun. Holmes and I kept our faces pressed against the boards and stared up at the outline that was Steven, his head raised slightly above the boat. He turned to us, and I could see the faint gleam of his teeth as he spoke.
“They're coming this way, might not see us if they don't put their searchlights on. If they're going to hit us, I'll give you ten seconds' warning. Fill your lungs, dive off to the stern as far as you can, and swim like the living hell. Best take your shoes off now.”
Holmes and I wrestled with each other's laces and tugged, then lay again waiting. The heavy churn seemed just feet away, but Steven said nothing. We remained frozen. The thud of the ship's engines became my heart-beat, and then terrifyingly a huge wall loomed above us and dim lights flew past our heads. Without warning the skiff dropped and then leapt into the air, spinning about in time to hit the next wave broadside, drenching us and coming within a hair's-breadth of overturning before we were slapped back into place by the following one. Down and up and down and around we were tossed until eventually, wet through and dizzy as a child's top, we bobbled on the sea like the piece of flotsam we were and listened to the engines fade.
“Welcome to Palestine,” Steven whispered, grinning ferociously.
“O Jerusalem is a standout!”—The Washington Post Book World
If you enjoyed Laurie R. King's Night Work,
you won't want to miss her stand-alone thriller,
FOLLY
available from
Bantam Books
Celebrated woodworker Rae Newborn sets foot on the uninhabited Pacific Northwest island known as Folly, about to embark on the most important project of her life. She intends to restore a long-abandoned ruin— the house built 70 years ago by her great-uncle Desmond Newborn—and thus rebuild her own life, shattered by tragedy and shadowed by devastating depression.
The gray-haired woman stood with her boots planted on the rocky promontory, and watched what was left of her family pull away. The Orca Queen's engines deepened as the boat cleared the cove entrance, and its nose swung around, a magnet oriented toward civilization.
Go, she told them silently. Don't slow down, don't even look back, just leave.
But then Petra's jacketed arm shot out from the boat's cabin, drab and shapeless and waving a wild adolescent farewell. Rae's own hand came up in an involuntary response, to wave her own goodbye—except that in the air, her wave changed, the hand reaching forward, stretched out in protest and cry for help, as if her outstretched fingers could pull them back to her, as if she was about to take off down the beach, scrambling desperately over rocks and water to call and scream and—. She caught the gesture before any of the three people on the boat could see it, snapped the offending arm down to her side and stood at rigid attention. The boat dwindled, rounded the end of the island, and was gone.
Thank God they didn't see that, Rae thought. The last thing I want is for Tamara to think I doubt what I'm doing.
So why do I feel like some ancient grandmother in one of those harsh nomadic tribes, left behind on the icy steppes for the good of the group? I chose this. I wanted this.
The engine's growl softened with the distance, grew faint, then merged into the island hush. No low mutter of far-away traffic, no neighbor's dogs and children, not even the pound of surf in this protected sea. A small airplane off to the north; the rusty-wheel squeak of a bird; the patter of tiny waves; and silence.
Alone, at last. For better or for worse.
Look for this superb novel at your
favorite bookseller's. And you won't want to miss
any of Laurie R. King's unique works of fiction!
NIGHT WORK
A Bantam Book
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2000 by Laurie R. King
Quotations used in chapter openers are from “The Invocation to
Kali,” from A GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED by May Sarton.
Copyright © 1971 by May Sarton.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 99-057060.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-56796-3
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
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