Judgement Day

Judge, Karen Traviss

This is the final volume in Traviss’ compelling Wess’har series, which, as Gentle Reader may recall, I have been raving about since reading the first volume of the series, City of Pearl. If you haven't read the first five books, these comments probably won't mean much to you. If you have - then you're almost certainly going to buy this anyway, if you haven't already got it sitting in your TBR pile.

Thisis the showdown we've known was coming for at least three volumes. The Eqbas – the parent culture of the Wess'har and the self-appointed ecological cops and conservators of the galaxy – have arrived at Earth, Shan Frankland has come home, and all the multiple plot lines are coming to their final conclusions.

The pervasive themes of making decisions, taking responsibility and accepting consequences are, if anything, heightened in this final chapter as all of the journeys undertaken by the key characters, their choices and their actions along the way, reach their final destinations, and humanity is required to take global action to deal with its own history of choices, actions and inactions. The book is very much about judgements, just punishments and just rewards, justification, redemption and damnation, and I think that most readers who have followed the series this far will be content with the final disposition of the characters.

And there’s a poignant lesson in the final pages, where a relatively minor character – at least from the perspective of the reader, who has been focused for so long on the central character of Shan Frankland – ruminates on what has led to the passing of judgement on humanity for its crimes against the Earth and dismisses from his mind the cop whose name he can’t recall, who he met once just after the Eqbas came to Earth, and who surely can’t have been of any consequence to the story he plans to tell.

Mary Russell comes home

Locked Rooms, Laurie R. King

Laurie King’s Mary Russell mysteries, about a brilliant young woman of a most determined character and her mentor, partner, lover and eventually spouse, the Great Detective himself, have been captivating me for some time now.

What’s interesting about the structure of the series itself is that, rather than continuing to write novels that are exclusively pastiches of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, King has taken to making each new volume a study in a specific style of mystery writing – the country house mystery, the spy mystery, the adventure thriller, to name a few.

Locked Rooms is a psychological thriller. We’ve long known that there is a tragic incident in Mary’s past, an accident that left her an orphan and has also left her with psychological scars that have been concealed as best as possible but never healed. Now Mary and Holmes have come to San Francisco, Mary’s home and the site of the accident – but as she begins to recover memories that have been suppressed, it becomes clear that there is much more to both the accident that killed the rest of her family, and to her memories of her past, than anyone has suspected. And whatever is buried in her past is enough to make someone willing to commit murder to ensure that it is never uncovered.

Another enjoyable chapter in the Mary Russell story.