Locked Rooms

Locked Rooms is the eighth Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes novel by Laurie R. King, published in 2005. The events follow directly from The Game, and the pair travel to San Francisco, where Russell grew up, to close up the house and businesses she inherited.

Unlike the earlier novels in the sequence, this one is divided into five separate books, and it alternates between Mary Russell's familiar first-person narrative and a third-person narrator following Sherlock Holmes. The change of form is the reason it is often described as the point where the series examines its own method of narration. The San Francisco of the book is also the city of the 1906 earthquake and fire, which is the event Russell's memory has been organised around.

The story's material is inherited obligation. Russell has spent her adolescence and adulthood blaming herself for the car accident that killed her family, and the trip to San Francisco is a matter of closing up a house and businesses rather than of tourism. A codicil to the family will and a break-in at the property turn that housekeeping into an investigation of a crime the novel treats as still active.