Dreaming Spies

Dreaming Spies is a 2015 mystery novel by the American author Laurie R. King and the thirteenth book in the Mary Russell series, featuring the married detectives Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes. Although it is thirteenth in sequence, the events it describes take place between those of The Game and Locked Rooms.

The book was published by Bantam Press on 17 February 2015, with an audiobook narrated by Jenny Sterlin. It is set in 1925, and the plot opens with the arrival of the stone, which the two of them last saw in the Tokyo garden of the future emperor of Japan, and which suggests that the work they did for him in 1924 was not finished. The stone is one that stood in the Imperial gardens in Kyoto, and its arrival in Sussex is what makes the earlier work look unfinished.

The narrative therefore alternates between the present investigation and the earlier Japanese assignment. On board the ship in 1924, Russell met a young Japanese woman who taught the two of them about her country and arranged a secret meeting with the Prince Regent, and in 1925 that same woman reappears when Russell returns to Oxford.