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Zusatztext "May well be the best King has devised yet…. The sights! smells and ideas of India make interesting! evocative reading." —Publishers Weekly ! starred review "A rousing adventure story made credible by the sheer force of its characters' personalities and the sharply realized details of their surroundings. Good historical fiction is as close as we'll ever get to time travel! and historical fiction doesn't get any better than this." —The Denver Post "A wondrously taut mystery! ticking away like a malevolent clock."— Booklist (starred review) "Splendid...perhaps the rippingest of all Russell's ripping tales."— Seattle Times Informationen zum Autor Laurie R. King Klappentext It's only the second day of 1924, but Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, find themselves embroiled in intrigue. It starts with a New Year's visit from Holmes's brother Mycroft, who comes bearing a strange package containing the papers of an English spy named Kimball O'Hara-the same Kimball known to the world through Kipling's famed Kim. Inexplicably, O'Hara withdrew from the "Great Game" of espionage and now he has just as inexplicably disappeared. When Russell discovers Holmes's own secret friendship with the spy, she knows the die is cast: she will accompany her husband to India to search for the missing operative. But Russell soon learns that in this faraway and exotic land, it's often impossible to tell friend from foe-and that some games aren't played for fun but for the highest stakes of all…life and death. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Laurie R. King's Garment of Shadows. Leseprobe Chapter One Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one's daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage. On the first of January, 1924, I was enjoying a peaceful New Year's evening with my partner and husband, Sherlock Holmes, in our snug stone house on the Sussex Downs, blissfully unaware that scarcely forty hours later I would be sprinting desperately for a train across a snow-covered railway siding. But on the first day of the new year, I was at peace and I was at home, with a full stomach, a tipsy head, and—most pleasant of all—warm feet. No fewer than three bottles of wine stood on the sideboard, in various stages of depletion. Holmes had just taken a connoisseur's sip of the last to appear in our glasses, a dusty port twice as old as I. He sighed in satisfaction and stretched his slippers out to the fire. "It is good to find that the French vineyards are recovering from the War," he noted, although of the three wines, only the champagne had gone into its bottle since 1918. I agreed, rather absently I will admit. As I took a swallow of the glorious liquid, it occurred to me that some part of the back of my mind was braced for a ring of the telephone or a furious pounding on the door. The visceral mistrust of leisure was perhaps understandable: Twice in the past six months the outside world had crashed in on us; indeed, we had been similarly seated before the fire one evening a scant two months earlier when an investigation literally fell into our arms, in the form of an old friend with a bloodied head. It was not yet midnight, and I had no faith in our stout oaken door to keep out surprises of the kind Holmes tended to attract. However, pleasantly enough, no pounding fist came to trouble our companionship or, later, our slumber, and we rose early the next morning, fortified ourselves with one of Mrs. Hudson's hearty breakfasts (this one even more elaborate than usual, to make up for her being cheated of preparing the dinner for this, my twenty-fourth birthday), and bundled into our warmest clothes for the sleet-drenched trip to Londo...
