I've read every single Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes mystery that Laurie King has written. Her writing is cumbersome and bogged down by research. But I like it. I loved the earlier books in the series. I even was okay with the last book The Murder of Mary Russell, also though having to wait from when the title was announced to its original publication was a massive pain in my heart. Let me make this clear, the Mary Russell series is one of the series that turned me into a die-hard mystery fan. I loved the banter between Russell and Sherlock and that she could be really brilliant and just be herself.

But this book should not have been published. Mary needs to find Lady Vivian she has run away after having spent most of her life in asylums. Holmes and Russell make their way to Venice where they try and find her. When characters who have been consistent in their personalities for 14 books suddenly act like different people, that's a significant problem. Mary Russell is brainy and logical, the way this mystery was solved was by a stroke of luck. Russell felt like an entirely different character, she was the essential flapper of the 1920s, she was partying, she just wasn't the same bookish brilliant woman from the earlier books. Sherlock Holmes is pretty much absent for the majority of the book. He's running around working on his own case, but the thing that made this series magic was the partnership between Holmes and Russell, and this book was missing it.

The writing itself was just not like Laurie King. It was bogged down, the sentence structure was way too much of the same. Some of the descriptions were just repeated throughout the book, and there was way too much telling of the story rather than showing. This will be my last Mary Russell novel that I will be reading. I'm just so disappointed, I loved this series, and it's just become mediocre.