The Moor and less

The Moor. Laurie R. King.

Watching a friend’s vacation slides may be an agreeable way to spend an evening, but Laurie R. King tests readers’ patience with the same technique when she sends Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, to “The Moor.”

The title refers to Dartmoor, nearly 400 square miles of fields, hills and treacherous marshes in the southwest of England. Conan Doyle set “The Hound of the Baskervilles” there, and King uses a rumored reappearance of the hound as the pretext for drawing her sleuthing couple there. They’re summoned by the eccentric clergyman, author and hymn writer (“Onward Christian Soldiers”) Sabine Baring-Gould, now nearly 90 and in failing health.

But before the inquiry gets underway, we’re given a long dissertation from Mrs. Holmes about Baring-Gould and Dartmoor. Between the suspicious death of a local who wandered off the straight and familiar and the discovery of a body in the good minister’s lake, there’s nearly 200 pages of Russell reading Baring-Gould’s books, Russell talking with the man and Russell riding about the countryside and chatting up the locals. Getting to the heart of the hound mystery takes up the last hundred pages, with remarkably little of the suspense which the novel advertises.

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