The Murder of Mary Russell

The Murder of Mary Russell is a mystery novel by the American writer Laurie R. King, published in 2016. It belongs to the series about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes that began with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994.

The series presents itself as a set of memoirs written and compiled by an elderly Mary Russell, with editorial notes, so the reader is always aware that the account is being assembled long after the events it describes. In this novel the story moves away from the two detectives and towards Mrs Hudson, the housekeeper who has been part of Holmes's household since before Russell arrived, and who turns out to have a past of her own involving a voyage, a shipwreck and a name she has not used for years. The book begins with a disappearance and a great deal of blood, and then goes back to explain how the woman in the house came to be there and what she had been running from. King uses the established cast and the domestic arrangement of the series to make the history credible rather than to add a new detective to it.

Several of the later novels in the series step away from Russell's own voice to fill in other characters, and this is the one that does the same for the housekeeper who has been present since the first book.