The Pirate King, by Laurie R. King

I will be the first to admit that I am sometimes afflicted with literary snobbishness, one area of which is the genre of mysteries. I've tried to read some, and they just don't appeal to me. My sense of most mystery/thriller authors is that they are skilled mainly in quantity, not quality. It was with some hesitation that I picked up this Laurie King mystery, but then found it to be so much fun! Granted, the main reason I enjoyed it so much as that it is ever so British. "The Pirate King" is King's eleventh novel in a series about Mary Russell, wife of Sherlock Holmes, who narrates with a quintessentially British wit. The mystery was rather secondary to the rest of the novel, which was just fine by me since mysteries aren't my thing. But it was quite clever, I thought, very engagingly written and smart, and I really enjoyed reading it. So now I know not to judge a book by its author, and that I have a new series I can read when I need my British humor fix.