LAURIE KING – Grave Talent. Alonzo Hawkins & Casey Martinelli #1. St. Martin’s, hardcover, 1993. Bantam, paperback reprint, 1995.

   There are so many first novels appearing now, in both hardcover and paper, that it’s a wonder to me that any of them get bought. How do you choose? I usually don’t, barring a free review copy, but for some reason this caught my attention, and I did.

   The ingredients are familiar: crusty old San Francisco homicide detective (Alonzo Hawkins) is assigned a newly promoted female partner (Casey Martinelli) to work on a brutal and sensational child murder, as much for political reasons as anything else.

   Then a second and third child are murdered, and all are found to center on a rural colony outside San Francisco. One of the residents of the colony is a famous artist living incognito there, who also happens to have been convicted of and served a sentence for child murder. Too obvious? Maybe, maybe not; certainly many things are not as they seem.

   This was an interesting book, and overall a good one. It wasn’t a typical procedural, but neither was it a let’s-get-touchy-feely-with-the-characters-and-to-hell-with-police-reality type.

   The story is told mostly from Martinelli’s viewpoint, and really has two main focal points other than the mystery proper: the tortured life of the artist, and the relationship between the detectives.

   Martinelli and Hawkin are both complex and interesting characters that I think will bear the weight of a series, though it isn’t clear if there will be one. The writing is quite good. This isn’t one of those books that shouts that a new star is born, but it’s considerably better than the first-novel norm, and I think the lady has a future.

   Recommended.

Editorial Comments:   Barry was right on the money on two counts. First of all, Grave Talent won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery in 1994. Barry must have been among the first to read, review and recognize that the book was “considerably better” than most first mysteries.

   And yes, Laurie King has had a future, and yes, Grave Talent was the first of a series. (Does that make three counts?) There are five in the series now, the most recent being The Art of Detection (2006).

   If anything, though, Laurie King is more well-known for her second series of mystery novels, the one in which Mary Russell meets and befriends Sherlock Holmes at a young age (hers). He becomes her mentor in solving several crimes, then later her partner and companion; in fact, they later marry. There are eleven in this series, the most recent one being Pirate King (2011).