The Game

The Game is a 2004 mystery novel by the American author Laurie R. King and part of the Mary Russell series featuring the married detectives Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes.

The premise is a search abroad. Russell and Holmes travel to India under assumed identities to look for an operative who has disappeared, and the man's reputation is bound up with the fiction written about him, which is why the book is often described as the series' most explicitly literary adventure.

The pair's situation is complicated by the setting. British intelligence, local authorities and other interested parties are all pursuing their own objectives, so the search has to be conducted behind cover and the couple's marriage has to be concealed along with their identities. The missing man is the orphan said to have inspired Rudyard Kipling's Kim, which is the book's own joke about sources, since the pair are looking for someone who has already become a character in another writer's story. King keeps Russell and Holmes on equal terms, and this volume has them covering for each other in a country where neither can be openly what they are.