Garment of Shadows

Garment of Shadows is the twelfth Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novel by Laurie R. King, published in 2012. It has the married detectives working separately in Morocco, and its events follow those of Pirate King while reconnecting with Ali and Mahmoud Hazr from O Jerusalem and Justice Hall.

At the end of 1924, Russell has just finished working with a film company in Morocco, but she is not where she should be when Holmes comes to meet her in Fez, and when she wakes in a strange room she does not know where or who she is. The city is on the edge of war, so the search for her is also a search for what has been happening in Morocco, and a missing Englishwoman there is a diplomatic problem as well as a personal one.

The novel's device is the divided search. Holmes is looking for his wife while Russell is looking for her own identity after a heavy blow to the head, so the two plots are parallel rather than joined until the memory begins to return. That makes it a book about the reconstruction of a self alongside a political crisis.