A Letter of Mary

A Letter of Mary is the third Mary Russell novel by Laurie R. King, published in 1997, and it follows The Beekeeper's Apprentice and A Monstrous Regiment of Women. The book is set in the 1920s, after the First World War, which places it in the same period as the earlier novels in the sequence.

The premise turns on an archaeological find. A scholar working in Palestine uncovers a letter attributed to a woman who was an apostle, and the document's implications are what make it valuable and dangerous. The archaeologist is then murdered on her return to England, and the investigation is about the commercial and institutional interests around the discovery rather than about antiquities theft.

King pairs the case with the partnership between Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, which is the organising idea of the series, and the book's method is to put an explicitly modern woman inside a period setting where her authority is not assumed. Historical mysteries of this kind were a significant part of the crime market in the 1990s, and this series is one of the longer-running examples.