The Art of Detection

Kate Martenelli, an 18-year veteran of the San Francisco Homicide Department, has worked on a number of odd cases in her career. This one might be the oddest.

It begins when she and her partner Al Hawkins are sent to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to see a body. The GGNRA is a crazy quilt of jurisdictions, but it looks like a body dump and not a murder scene, and the victim Philip Gilbert was a resident of San Francisco.

Their first stop is a visit to his home in San Francisco where they discover that he was a very devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. His home recreates Sherlock Holmes's rooms including gas lighting and bullet holes in the wall patterned to look like VR for Victoria Regina. Gilbert was a noted show more collector and also wrote books on Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. It is possible that he was murdered over possession of a typed manuscript that may have been written by Conan Doyle while he was visiting San Franciso in the 1920s.

The manuscript is included in this book and tells the story of an investigation conducted by a nameless narrator. The story concerns a missing person, transvestites, prostitutes, a murder, and the 1920s version of "don't ask, don't tell." If it is authentic, it could be worth more than $1 million at auction.

As Kate and Al dig into Philip's life, they learn a lot about the obsessions of collectors and devotees of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. They also learn that Gilbert had few friends beyond the nine other people who were part of his dinner club. They are all more than casual fans too and they are all potential suspects for his murder.

This was a great story. I liked Kate's relationship with her partner Lee and their daughter Nora. There was a great deal of contrast between gay life in San Francisco in 2004 as opposed to the 1920s. Though there are still some holdovers to old attitudes.

The narration was well done. I especially enjoyed Robert Ian Mackenzie's narration of the long-long and newly discovered story that is the centerpiece of this book. Alyssa Bresnahan did an excellent job with the characters in the contemporary story.

Now I want to go back and read the earlier Kate Martinelli stories. show less

Kate Martenelli, an 18-year veteran of the San Francisco Homicide Department, has worked on a number of odd cases in her career. This one might be the oddest.

It begins when she and her partner Al Hawkins are sent to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area to see a body. The GGNRA is a crazy quilt of jurisdictions, but it looks like a body dump and not a murder scene, and the victim Philip Gilbert was a resident of San Francisco.

Their first stop is a visit to his home in San Francisco where they discover that he was a very devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. His home recreates Sherlock Holmes's rooms including gas lighting and bullet holes in the wall patterned to look like VR for Victoria Regina. Gilbert was a noted show more collector and also wrote books on Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. It is possible that he was murdered over possession of a typed manuscript that may have been written by Conan Doyle while he was visiting San Franciso in the 1920s.

The manuscript is included in this book and tells the story of an investigation conducted by a nameless narrator. The story concerns a missing person, transvestites, prostitutes, a murder, and the 1920s version of "don't ask, don't tell." If it is authentic, it could be worth more than $1 million at auction.

As Kate and Al dig into Philip's life, they learn a lot about the obsessions of collectors and devotees of Sherlock Holmes and Arthur Conan Doyle. They also learn that Gilbert had few friends beyond the nine other people who were part of his dinner club. They are all more than casual fans too and they are all potential suspects for his murder.

This was a great story. I liked Kate's relationship with her partner Lee and their daughter Nora. There was a great deal of contrast between gay life in San Francisco in 2004 as opposed to the 1920s. Though there are still some holdovers to old attitudes.

The narration was well done. I especially enjoyed Robert Ian Mackenzie's narration of the long-long and newly discovered story that is the centerpiece of this book. Alyssa Bresnahan did an excellent job with the characters in the contemporary story.

Now I want to go back and read the earlier Kate Martinelli stories. show less

The Art of Detection - L.R.King
Audio performance by Alyssa Bresnahan and Robert Mackenzie
4 stars

This was a reread/listen for me. After I read L.R. King's recent Back to the Garden, I was remembering her earlier Kate Martinelli series. This was the final book of that series which I liked, but was, at the time, too violent for my tastes. I believe I liked this book more the second time around.

This may have been the first ‘book within a book’ that I’d read. The contemporary crime revolves around the discovery of a possibly unknown Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes story. That story, included in the text, is of course its own mystery. Both mysteries are set in San Francisco; Holmes in the early 20th century; Matinelli in 2004. The Holmes show more story does not overlap with King’s Mary Russell series, although it is tempting to force a fit between them.

The contemporary murder victim is the owner of the newly discovered story. If authenticated, the story would command an astronomical price at auction. Serious suspension of disbelief is required. The story has Holmes investigating the murder of a gay man at the behest of his transvestite lover. No serious (real life) collector could ever believe that Conan Doyle could have written such a story. Setting that problem aside, it was an entertaining short story with some great historical California background. The contemporary story is a decent police procedural, but was more about an HEA for Martinelli and her female partner. This book won a Lamba award in 2006 and has a bit of 21st century California history, celebrating the first same sex marriages in the country. (Authorized by Gavin Newsom the San Francisco Mayor at the time, and our current governor. The book has an obvious social agenda.) show less

http://tinyurl.com/ybzkx95x

This one tickled my fancy more than others she's written. What King did here was put ALL her feelings about the LGBT community into one smartly delivered package (although it's certainly true that her previous books have provided plenty of her thoughts in that area).

And, of course, she takes this opportunity to start merging her series together - in this case her Sherlock Holmes series and her lesbian detective series - by writing a short story a la Holmes inside a contemporary detective novel. At first, I was surprised that she was going to have Martinelli read the entire story, but when I had finished that part, I understood why she followed that course of action.

The short story is integral to the completion show more of the novel, mostly because they mirror each other but also because they contain precisely the same themes. There are all the hallmarks of the Martinelli stories - lesbian families, supportive cops and friends, descriptions of some of the best places in the San Francisco area (hello, Marin Headlands!), life-threatening situations only Kate can handle - but it is missing one common theme, which is religion. One of the things I have always liked about King stories is that they often contain theological themes. In this novel, she has supplanted that with something equally important.

The book also feels like it's wrapping up a lot of history (aka 5 novels in the same series) and I don't expect to see another one for Kate Martinelli for a long time, if ever. I think I'm okay with that, because of how she finished this one. show less

This was the most enjoyable Kate Martinelli book I've read yet. Kate Martinelli is an out lesbian cop in San Francisco. It always surprised me that the author is not a lesbian--nonetheless it's a well-written series. I was a little annoyed at first that this book involves a Sherlock Holmes fan club--I mean she's already written a whole series about Holmes--is she completely obsessed?! But it is an engaging mystery and I even enjoyed the "story within a story" technique though I don't usually like that. It was also nice to finally read a book in the series in which Kate's personal life is going really well, defying the stereotype that you can't be a cop/detective and have any kind of satisfying home life.

I spent a year stationed at Fort Baker, so much of the story takes place on familiar terrain; every now and then there was be an "I remember that" moment while I read. On the other hand, there's a factual error in the embedded "short story" (Fort Cronkhite didn't exist until 1937); were someone to try to market that story as Conan Doyle's they'd soon run afoul of that error.

But gosh this one's fun, if a bit odd. I'm gonna miss Kate Martinelli and her friends.

Kate Martinelli has seen her share of weird things as a San Francisco cop, but never anything quite like this: an ornate Victorian sitting room straight out of a Sherlock Holmes story—complete with violin, tobacco-filled Persian slipper, and gun shots in the wallpaper that spell out the initials of the late queen.

Philip Gilbert was a true Holmes fanatic, from his antiquated décor to his vintage wardrobe. And no mere fan of fiction’s greatest detective, but a leading expert with a collection of priceless memorabilia—a collection some would kill for.

And perhaps someone did: In his collection is a century-old manuscript purportedly written by Holmes himself—that eerily echoes details of Gilbert’s own murder.

Now, with the help of show more her partner, Al Hawkin, Kate must do her best to follow the convoluted mind of a killer, one who may have trained at the feet of the greatest mind of all times. show less