Mary and Sherlock do it again
Once again, Mary Russell and Sherlock prove to be a formidable team. In the best sense of fun, we are drawn into another subtle plot that Arthur Conan Doyle would have loved. The setting, Baskerville Hall, is one all Holmes fans are familiar with. And the outcome is not as predictable as Holmes fans might expect. A very enjoyable read.

Better if Heard
I strongly recommend the CD version of this book. This story is meant to be heard, not read. In this way it is like many other tales and legends to come out of "The Moor". Jenny Sterlin does a very good job performing the novel.

Like being on the moor....
King's description of Darkmoor is wonderful - you can feel the eerieness and the fog and worry about hounds and anything else. I enjoy the way King brings in real historic people and makes them part of the Sherlock legend. In the process, those of us who are not English learn about parts of England and the people who live there. This is one of her best Sherlock/Russel books yet!

More travelog than thriller
atching a friend's vacation slides may be an agreeable way to spend an evening, but Laurie R. King tests readers' patience with the same technique when she sends Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, to"The Moor."

The title refers to Dartmoor, nearly 400 square miles of fields, hills and treacherous marshes in the southwest of England. Conan Doyle set "The Hound of the Baskervilles" there, and King uses a rumored reappearance of the hound as the pretext for drawing her sleuthing couple there. They're summoned by the eccentric clergyman, author and hymn writer ("Onward Christian Soldiers") Sabine Baring-Gould, now nearly 90 and in failing health.

But before the inquiry gets underway, we're given a long dissertation from Mrs. Holmes about Baring-Gould and Dartmoor. Between the suspicious death of a local who wandered off the straight and familiar and the discovery of a body in the good minister's lake, there's nearly 200 pages of Russell reading Baring-Gould's books, Russell talking with the man and Russell riding about the countryside and chatting up the locals. Getting to the heart of the hound mystery takes up the last hundred pages, with remarkably little of the suspense which the novel advertises.

Mary, quite contrary ?
I've given up trying to read this book. Like everyone else, I started with the wonderful 'The Beekeeper's Apprenctice' and am trying to read my way through the rest of the series, but none of the others have matched BA so far. And this one is just so bad, after struggling my way at the rate of 1/2 pages per day (v. rare for me I can tell you), I've now given it up as hopeless. I think the worst for me is to see Mary become the total antithesis of what she started out as - I think some reviewers here described her as a shrew, and a more apt expression couldnt be found. Most of the fun, in reading these pastiches was, alongside Holmes, to have the development of Mary into the wonderful character she was in the first and second books. I'm so disappointed with this, and even though O Jerusalem has good reviews I might take a break before getting back to the Russell series again.