Riviera Gold

Mary Russell, still reeling from revelations about former landlady Mrs. Hudson’s criminal past in The Murder of Mary Russell, travels to Monaco to check on the woman she thought she knew well. Holmes needs reassurance that she’s still on the straight and narrow. When the corpse of a young man is discovered in Hudson’s home, and her involvement with criminal types comes to light, it seems Clarissa Hudson is up to her former tricks. Or is it all a frame for something much more sinister? Russell and Holmes continue romping with the artists of the “Lost Generation,” moving from Cole Porter in Venice (Island of the Mad) to Pablo Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Riviera. The artist’s colony and name-dropping of its now-famous denizens form the backdrop to a case that combines the high life of the 1920s with the knowledge that war will return, all wrapped in a case that mixes Holmes’s and Hudson’s past with skulduggery in the present.