Justice Hall

Justice Hall is the sixth Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novel by Laurie R. King, published in 2002, and it takes the pair out of London and into an English country house. The case reaches back to 1918 and to a death in the Hughenfort family that the war conveniently obscured.

The two detectives divide the work: Holmes goes to London to look into the war record, while Russell joins a shooting party in the country, where the household's remaining secrets are kept, which lets the series show its two partners working as equals on separate halves of one case. The stranger who brings them the problem is Marsh Hughenfort, who returned to England as head of his family after his brother's death, and the death they are asked about is dated to 1918.

A missing diary and a purloined item are among the materials the case turns on, and the answers are divided between London records and a country house, which is the arrangement the two of them work through in parallel. The country house is full of people who know the family's history, which is why the question of who the dead man really was cannot be settled from the house alone.