It begins one winter’s evening in the early Twenties when Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes are seated by their fire, sharing stories about the unexplored portions of their past. Naturally, a person might expect the older Holmes to have a large collection of these—but tonight it is Russell who astonishes her husband with news of a previously unknown, even unsuspected, relation, and her own flirtation with a criminous past. (Now collected in Mary Russell’s War, e-book and print.)