Special Event: A Zoom Meeting with Laurie R. King held for The Beekeeper’s Apprentices of Chicago & the Midwest. You will be able to see, listen and speak with Laurie via Zoom. As you know, Zoom time is limited and being at Centuries & Sleuths Bookstore as promptly as traffic allows would work out best for you. Also, as a commercial announcement we will have copies of all Laurie’s books now available. Buying books helps keep small independent specialty bookstores around. Finally, for your convenience there plenty of restaurants and specialty confectionary (Brown Cow Ice Cream Parlor and the Twisted Cookie) stores on Madison all within walking and wheelchair distance of C&S. Check out  https://exploreforestpark.com. We hope to see you here!

Date: August 11, 2022

Day: Thursday

Time: 3:00 PM

Biography:  Most of you will know this already, but I thought I would be it in anyway. Also, below I have posted some of Laurie's titles that are not Mary Russell stories to widen your horizons.

Photo by Josh Edelson 

Laurie R. King is the third generation in her family native to the San Francisco area. She spent her childhood reading her way through libraries up and down the West Coast; her middle years raising children, renovating houses, traveling the world, and doing a BA and MA in theology.  (Her long autobiography goes into detail about how she uses these interests.)  King now lives a genteel life of crime, on California’s central coast.

Her crime novels are both serial and stand-alone. First in the hearts of most readers comes Mary Russell, who met the retired Sherlock Holmes in 1915 and became his apprentice, then his partner. Beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, Russell and Holmes move through the Teens and Twenties in amiable discord, challenging each other to ever greater feats of detection.

In the Russell & Holmes stories, King explores ideas—the roots of conflict in the Middle East and Afghanistan; feminism and early Christianity; patriotism and individual responsibility—while also having a rousing good time.  Various stories revisit The Hound of the Baskervilles and Kipling’s Kim, set a pair of Bedouin nomads down in a grand country house in England, and offer an insider’s view of the great quake and fire of 1906, all the while forging an unlikely relationship between two remarkably similar individuals who happen to be separated by age, sex, and background.

King’s Stuyvesant & Grey series, also historical, follows American ex-Bureau of Investigation agent Harris Stuyvesant, damaged young Captain Bennett Grey, and Grey’s sister Sarah as they move through Europe between the Wars.

Five King novels concern San Francisco homicide inspector Kate Martinelli, Kate’s SFPD partner Al Hawkin, and her life partner Lee Cooper. In the course of the stories, Kate has encountered a female Rembrandt, a modern-day Holy Fool, two difficult teenagers, and a manifestation of the goddess Kali.

King’s stand-alone suspense novels include A Darker Place, the story of a middle-aged professor of religion who investigates “cults” for the FBI, and encounters a movement that embraces the dangerous beliefs of alchemy.  Folly tells of woodworker Rae Newborne, who comes to a deserted island to rebuild a house, and her life. Keeping Watch is the story of Rae’s friend Allen Carmichael, a Vietnam vet who draws on his combat experiences to rescue abused women and children—until he comes across a boy whose problems may rival his own. Califia’s Daughters (a paperback original by “Leigh Richards”) is a post-apocalyptic sort of tale set in a near future where women rule and men are fragile.