THE MOOR

King's have always been the most ambitious of all Sherlock Holmes pastiches (A Letter of Mary, 1997, etc.), and her fourth is no exception: She dares to meet the great man on the hallowed ground of Dartmoor, where he returns in 1924 with his wife, Oxford theologian Mary Russell, in response to the dying Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould's reports of fresh sightings of the Hound of the Baskervilles. Several locals swear they've seen traces of the Hound, or of the spectral coach of the legendary supernatural femme fatale Lady Howard, even before tin miner Josiah Gorton is found killed. Since Holmes and Russell split up for most of their investigations, he cuts a regrettably muffled figure; the real stars here are cranky real-life savant Baring-Gould (grandfather of Holmes ``biographer'' W.S. Baring-Gould) and the moor itself, evoked in fabulously atmospheric terms by Russell. And King not only provides a suitably generous array of things that go bump in the night, but supplies an explanation for all the skullduggery (whose dramatis personae include the brash American gold tycoon currently resident in Baskerville Hall, another illegitimate Baskerville scion, and a second murder victim) that's at least as ingenious and plausible as Conan Doyle's own. Despite the incursion of motorcars and electricity, what stays longest is the impression of the moor's brooding timelessness, as powerful now as back in 1902.