The Art of Detection (Kate Martinelli Mystery) [Paperback]

If you have scanned the reviews for this book, you'll note a wide range of stars among the reviews. It seems to be a love-it or hate-it book, but I found it an engrossing and highly entertaining read.

For the uninitiated, Laurie R. King has several series of mysteries. The two best known are a Sherlock Holmes series, written from the first-person perspective of Holmes' wife (yeah, it takes an initial suspension of disbelief, but once there, you are a believer) and one featuring Kate Martinelli, a modern day San Francisco homicide detective. I love both series and read them avidly as they appear. This book entwines the two series, with Kate Martinelli taking on a murder investigation that involves local "Sherlockians".

A couple of things made this book not for everyone. The author has a descriptive narrative style and describes the physical environment in some detail. If someone is not familiar with San Francisco, the descriptions of the various neighborhoods and the directions of where the detectives where heading might get tedious. However, if you know San Francisco, even a little, they paint evocative pictures of the where and when and the people of the place.

On a similar note, if you have never been to the Marin Headlands on the "other side" of the Golden Gate Bridge, it might be be difficult to picture the juxtaposition of the raw physical beauty of the area and these old military relics/gun placements, etc.

Finally, the fact that the Kate Martinelli character is an unapologetic lesbian and that one of the subplots of the story revolved around a WWI soldier and his transvestite or transgendered partner may not have been to the taste of some readers. Pity them.

The pacing may have been slower than some of King's previous books, but I had trouble putting this down once I got into it.

This is the latest in King's Kate Martinelli mysteries. Is it the best of the series? No. It does progress the S.F. cop in her professional and personal life - She is living with her partner, Lee, and their daughter and show that relationship is just like any other 'marriage'. The plot of Detection holds much promise - an aficianado of Arthur Conan Doyle and his masterful Sherlock Holmes - is murdered, and Kate and her cop partner try to sort it out. Ms. King knows her Sherlock Holmes- writing the masterful Mary Russell series-where her husband/partner is none other than Sherlock Holmes himself. But this Martinelli book doesn't have the elegance of the Russell series, and it seems to plod along - I know true investigation is a lot of grunt work, but so many steps of it does not add to the integrity of the plot. Martinelli is a solid character and the premise of the series is a good one. But this book needed to move along at a tighter pace.

This is not the best of the Martinelli series, but any King work is great to read - it's just that with the subject matter of a character who was all consumed by one of the most wonderful fictional characters could have been so much more of a read.

Laurie R. King skillfully blends two of her mystery series in this book. The outer plot is a possible murder being investigated by series detective Kate Martinelli of the SFPD. The dead man is a Sherlock Holmes collector and dealer, organizer of a Holmes themed dinner club, and Kate finds a manuscript he had recently acquired, which seems to have been written by Conan Doyle during his brief stay in San Francisco in the 1920's. It is, of course, "actually" (at least to those of us familiar with King's Mary Russell / Sherlock Holmes series) a manuscript written by Holmes during their stay in San Francisco detailed in "Locked Rooms", a sidestory of an investigation he undertook while Russell was away on business. King has some fun playing with us, as to whether we are supposed to believe it is a scandalous and suppressed Conan Doyle fiction, or a historical account by Holmes.

Now this kind of thing can easily blow up or become tedious, but after some initial awkwardness King pulls it off and I found myself reading each story with equal interest yet without any real frustration at having to switch off one to the other. When the Holmes story finished (it occupies most of the third quarter of the book, as Kate is reading it for clues to her own case), I'm satisfied and ready to get back to modern days. Also great fun is the balancing of Kate's skeptical introduction to the world of the Sherlockians (she had little if any acquaintance with the Conan Doyle stories, much less the mystique they have gathered) against the interior Holmes story ... for instance, the narrator of the story refers to himself as Sigerson, which Kate doesn't realize is one of Holmes's aliases (and the one under which he and Russell were travelling in "Locked Rooms").

I'd almost give this one five stars, but a few problems tilt me to four:

-- as other reviewers have pointed out, the book does drag a bit in the early middle, and when we're first plopped into the Holmesian sub-story about halfway through. But eventually, when we get used to the change, it picks up to become quite a good read and I didn't find the minor switching back and forth and eventually entirely back to the Martinelli story distracting; it even seemed to have a good logical flow.

-- another reason for the .. ahem .. drag is the occasional lengthy digressions into Kate's personal and community life, lengthy, dewey-eyed PC treatises that is. I have nothing against gay/lesbian fiction per se, and enjoy, for instance, Jane Rule's novels and Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter mysteries. But these interludes seem forced, tacked on as if they, and not the story, are the real purpose of the book (which they likely are); and too picture perfect, Diversity Potemkin Villages as it were. (By contrast, the gay theme in the Holmes substory is integral to the plot and seems quite natural.)

-- although the plot builds nicely to a point near the end, where two convincing suspects are identified, the very end is unsatisfying in that Kate seems to decide, and take precipitate and drastic action, on the basis of weak evidence, and the final scenes (before another PC interlude) are less than convincing. (It doesn't help that the villain, if not the motive, was pretty obvious pretty early on.)