I was so psyched when this book landed on my desk earlier this week because Laurie King is always one of the top five authors who rock my world. So I happily took it home Tuesday night, got all comfy in bed, cracked the book and started reading. And promptly fell asleep. No kidding. I got through the first chaper okay, but the second chapter…my God in heaven, what was she thinking? It took four or five, maybe even more, pages of freakin’ description of a remote park in San Francisco, and multiple paragraphs of description of every damn person encountered before the cops even got to body.
Even so, I’m always going to give Ms. King the benefit of the doubt…maybe I was just a little too sleepy Tuesday night to fully appreciate the story. So I tried again Wednesday night. And remembered why I really don’t like King’s Kate Martinelli series. There’s little action, the characters are really annoying and boring ( except for Nora, who is always cute), and the heavy use of physical description that King employs so well in the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes series just bloats up and stinks in this century.
It’s weird. I really like everything else King has written, except the Kate Martinelli stuff. And before I’m accused of homophobia, let me just say that some of my closest friends are gay, so that arrow ain’t gonna fly. I am willing to admit, however, that boring people just really annoy me, especially when they’re at the center of a 200+ page book. There are too many other good things out there to read and I resent wasting time on a dog like this one. Nuff said.
It's All About the Book 
I think you’ve hit on exactly why this book doesn’t work — she’s tried to combine her two characters in one work, and it just doesn’t play.
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I was looking forward to reading Laurie King’s latest, too, and especially because it was a Kate Martinelli book. I like the Mary Russell books, but they’re sometimes a little slow and wordy for me. Interesting that you find the opposite is true (Kate being wordier than Mary). But to me, this book slowed to a crawl when we were forced to read the entire Sherlock Holmes “short” story in the middle of the book. If I’d wanted to read a Holmes book, I’d have read Conan Doyle or a Mary Russell novel. That’s not what I want from Kate Martinelli.
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