Laurie R. King was riffing on Sherlock Holmes before it was cool to do so. These days, with the popularity of television shows like “Sherlock” and “Elementary,” it can be easy to forget that King was putting her own spin on the Holmes stories more than 20 years ago. Her Holmes is an aging detective, paired with his much younger wife, Mary Russell, who complements his talents with her own investigative skills. The series has moved forwards and backwards in time, often seeing Russell and Holmes solving crimes in exotic locales (such as Japan in their previous adventure, DREAMING SPIES). Now, in THE MURDER OF MARY RUSSELL, it’s 1925, and the couple has returned to their home in rural Sussex. But as the title suggests, it’s anything but peaceful there.

The novel opens with Russell opening her home, reluctantly, to a strange man. At first she takes him for a slick door-to-door salesman, but the more he talks, the more her misgivings grow…until she turns around to offer the man some tea and finds herself looking down the barrel of his loaded gun.

"With THE MURDER OF MARY RUSSELL, King demonstrates once again that, at least under her pen, the possibilities for skillful Sherlock spinoffs are virtually limitless."

Just when the reader is convinced that things are about to take a dire turn for Russell, King pulls away to focus on another unsung heroine. She takes us back decades earlier, to the birth and young adulthood of the woman who’s now known as Mrs. Hudson, familiar to fans of the Holmes stories as Holmes’ landlady and (in King’s version) his housekeeper in Sussex. It turns out, though, that Mrs. Hudson has quite a storied (and sordid) history of her own, a history that is about to catch up to the present in Russell’s Sussex kitchen in 1925.

The narrative intersperses the account of the early life of Clarissa Hudson with present-day vignettes, as Holmes and Mrs. Hudson (not to mention Inspector Lestrade) confront some pretty gruesome evidence that leaves Holmes, at least, simultaneously bewildered, terrified and determined as he tries to get to the bottom of what happened to Russell…and how it’s connected to a secret dating back to before she was even born.

With THE MURDER OF MARY RUSSELL, King demonstrates once again that, at least under her pen, the possibilities for skillful Sherlock spinoffs are virtually limitless. This one offers a legitimately compelling insight into a minor character who easily could have been overlooked entirely. In doing so, she not only broadens the Holmesian landscape, she also continues her delightfully feminist project of writing women into the original Holmes narratives. Her latest novel is also a response to a specific Arthur Conan Doyle story, “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott,” which may send readers to look at that original tale with fresh eyes, or indeed for the first time.