At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England's green and pleasant land, Russell and Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes' enigmatic brother, Mycroft.

"Gentlemen, we are at your service." Thus Holmes greets the two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. Whatever role could the volatile Ali and the taciturn Mahmoud play in Mycroft's design for this land the British so recently wrested from the Turks? After passing a series of tests, Holmes and Russell learn their guides are engaged in a mission for His Majesty's Government, and disguise themselves as Bedouins--Russell as the beardless youth "Amir"--to join them in a stealthy reconnaissance through the dusty countryside.

A recent rash of murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the desert gully where it occurred. His singular findings will lead him and Russell through labyrinthine bazaars, verminous inns, cliff-hung monasteries--and into mortal danger. When her mentor's inquiries jeopardize his life, Russell fearlessly wields a pistol and even assays the arts of seduction to save him. Bruised and bloodied, the pair ascend to the jewellike city of Jerusalem, where they will at last meet their adversary, whose lust for savagery and power could reduce the city's most ancient and sacred place to rubble and ignite this tinderbox of a land.... ( )

King did a heck of a lot of research for this book, and since my knowledge of Palestine after WW1 was nearly nil, I learned a great deal. I was fascinated by the characters and plot. ( )

O Jerusalem takes us back in time to the first book when Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes had to flee England because of the danger they were in. The country they chose, or rather Mary chose, was Palestine.

This is the first book in the series that I didn’t quite like as much as the previous four books. That doesn’t mean that the book isn’t good. Just that it took some rereads to make me really appreciate the book. Now it’s a good book for me, and I wouldn’t mind re-read, but I was a bit disappointed when I read it the first time. Could be because I preferred the stories to move forward not reading about past events. It was quite a lot of years since I read it the first time so it’s hard to know exactly why. The case was probably just not as engrossing as the previous books cases.
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'O Jerusalem' was a book that I came to with reluctance rather than enthusiasm. I'd enjoyed the first four books in the series both because each book had a strong plot heightened by fascinating historical details and because Laurie King slowly grew the partnership between Russell and Holmes into something credible and intriguing. The retired, much older Holmes is an extension of Conan Doyle's creation, not a pastiche of it and Mary Russell, intelligent, brave, unconventional, intellectually rigorous and endlessly curious is a character strong enough not to be at Holmes' side without being in his shadow.

Yet, when I reached 'O Jerusalem', the fifth book, my enthusiasm for the series faltered. I was put off because the book goes back in time to fill in a blank few weeks in the first book, ‘The Beekeeper’s Apprentice’ when Russell and Holmes his away from their enemies by spending time abroad. This bothered me because I thought it was likely to lose the forward momentum in the relationship between Russel and Holmes that the first four books had delivered, and because it took me back to a point when the age gap and experience gap between Russell and Holmes had seemed too wide to be bridged. I was also put off by the setting of the book. I seldom enjoy books set in rancid politics of the Middle East and the behaviour of the British Government in 1919 seems to me to have been a major contributor to the instability of the region for the rest of the century.

In the end, I read 'O Jerusalem' simply so that I could move on and read the rest of the series. While the book didn't engage me in the way its predecessors had, it turned out not to be a dull chore either.

It had been so long since I'd read a Russell and Holmes book that I'd forgotten how much I enjoyed Mary Russell's low-key, slightly dry, very perceptive descriptions of people, places and events. Listening to Mary telling the story of her time with Holmes in Jerusalem was the strongest part of the book for me.

The plot is about espionage rather than solving a murder. I found it to be a little static, although the ending managed to have enough energy in it to read like a thriller. The sense of place was very strong. It didn't make me hungry to visit Palestine but it did bring both the discomforts of the environment and the richness of the culture to life.

I found myself out of sympathy with her romantic view of Jerusalem and her uncritical admiration of Edmund Allenby but I could see that they fitted into her character perfectly both as a religious scholar and as a nineteen-year-old coming face to face with one of the most charismatic men in the region.

I was surprised to find that the book helped me to become more comfortable with the relationship between Russell and Holmes. Throughout most of the book, Russell presents herself as a young Arab boy, called Amir. This seemed to be a very empowering experience for her, allowing her to display her odd mix of scholarship, language skills, and combat skills to advantage. I also liked the scene in the book where Russell attends a ball at Allenby's request and finds herself as the only single woman in a room full of young Army Officiers who buzz around her like flies. She rises to the occasion with aplomb and enjoys seeing Holmes' discomfort at the attention she receives.

So, having been reminded of how much I like Mary Russell, I'm now ready to resume reading the series and I'm looking forward to moving back up the timeline for the next book, 'Justice Hall' and seeing how a slightly older and no longer single Mary Russell handles a meeting with two men that she worked with closely in Palestine.
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This is a review for the audiobook version, which I listened to in the car to and from work and during which I was on school holidays for 2 weeks. I say this as a partial explanation for the next line:

Holy cheese whiz, it's finally over!

It felt like this book took an unusually long time to get through. In part, as I mentioned above, it's my "car read" and I didn't drive for 2 weeks, but also because for the first half of the book, there isn't much happening at all. A lot of Holmes and Russell walking about in the desert and I mean a lot of walking. For fully the first half of the book, almost nothing happens.

But oh, what a rich and vividly written first half of almost nothing it is. I'd come home from work driving through a very cold wet city and feel like I had to shower off the sand and sweat from the deserts of Palestine. I was never bored, never disinterested and when the second half of the book begins and Holmes and Russell are in Jerusalem, it all starts picking up speed until they are literally racing against a clock.

My only beef about this book is that it's #5 in the series, but takes place during the same time frame as Beekeeper's Apprentice; if I'd known this, I would have read it second, because it makes much more sense to me. As it stands at #5, I was left "undoing" several rather significant character developments in my head in order to properly place O Jerusalem and it's characters in the proper timeline.

I'll definitely re-read this book, and in print, because I think I missed a lot of details listening to it the first time around. But it was absolutely enjoyable and I can't recommend Jenny Sterlin's narration of the series strongly enough. ( )