Laurie R. King is well known for her Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes series (12 books so far). Her first book in the Kate Martinelli series, A Grave Talent (1993), won the best first novel awards from both the Mystery Writers of America and the Crime Writers Association. If you want to know more about the author and her novels, check out her website.Touchstone (2007) was originally written as a standalone novel. The book is set in the UK in 1926 and the story centers around the weeks leading up to the general strike. Harris Stuyvesant is an agent of the United States Justice Department's Bureau of Investigation, and he has arrived in England to track down the man responsible for terrorist bombings in the US. In London, he is introduced to an intelligence officer named Aldous Carstairs, who is willing to work with him in order to further his own ends. Along the way, Stuyvesant meets a victim of shell shock in Cornwall, Bennett Grey. Grey and his sister have ties to an aristocratic family, the Hurleighs.
I love the way King tells a story. She writes beautiful prose. She creates interesting characters that are fleshed out well. Even minor characters have interest and background. I have read four other books by her and they have all been engaging stories. Some of them focused too much on issues, too little on the mystery plot. This story does center around terrorism, and King has stated that she was exploring what turns people into terrorists (see this post), but the book is primarily an entertaining story set against the backdrop of serious events in history.
I cannot find any negatives in this book. I could complain that it is too long (548 pages). But that would only be because I like shorter books. While I was reading and after I finished, I could find no deadwood in this book that I would cut or pare down. I think each part leads up to the next and is necessary. It never gets boring.
The main protagonist travels from London to Cornwall. He spends time in the rural areas around Oxford. I am geographically-challenged and for once I actually felt like I knew where the locales were (there was a map in the book). I now know where Penzance is (a port in Cornwall, the most westerly major town in that county). The Pirates of Penzance is a favorite Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera in our household and I guess I knew it really existed, but I had never pictured it.
See this page at the author's site for background information on the settings. If you like historical fiction, and don't mind some elements of a conspiracy thriller, I heartily recommend this book. It now has a sequel, The Bones of Paris (2013).
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