Just thinking about Laurie R. King's Touchstone makes my shoulders do that snuggling motion—you know, the way you wriggle them as you settle into a really comfortable chair. There's an ancient family afghan keeping your legs warm and a mug of something hot and delicious nearby. It's winter, but you're warm, and soon you'll be transported elsewhere.

Where you'll be after opening Touchstone is 1926 England, a little London, a bit of Cornwall, but mostly Hurleigh House in Gloucestershire, the country home of one of the England's oldest, most distinguished and highly eccentric families. Harris Stuyvesant, an agent of the Bureau of Investigation ("Federal" has yet to be added), is on foreign shores to investigate the role of Lady Laura Hurleigh and her Labour politician lover in a series of bombings in the U.S., one of which permanently injured Stuyvesant's younger brother. While trying to get some answers—difficult because the British government is preparing for what is expected to be a disastrous general strike—Stuyvesant meets the mysterious Aldous Carstairs, who offers to help him in his investigation as long as Stuyvesant helps him with a pet project that just happens to have connections to Stuyvesant's case.

Despite his recognition that Carstairs is "slimy and political and no doubt as dangerous as a puddle of gas," Stuyvesant, who, like every other important character in the novel, has a secret motivation, allows Carstairs to involve him with Bennett Grey, a wounded veteran and friend of the Hurleigh family, who, Carstairs reveals, " 'knows things he should not be able to, as if he sees into people.' " Grey is the touchstone, the key to The Truth Project, the obsession that runs Carstairs' life. He got away, but now Carstairs sees a way to get him back and Stuyvesant can be used to make that happen.

California author King is best known for the best-selling Mary Russell novels, a series that proposes new investigations (and a wife—Mary Russell) for Sherlock Holmes. Touchstone is not part of a series, but King is so skillful, so adept at plotting and making her characters come alive, that she leaves you wishing that it were.

Joanne Collings is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C. Copyright 2008 BookPage Reviews.

With this new stand-alone, King once again departs from escapades of her series detectives Mary Russell (The Game ) and Kate Martinelli (The Art of Detection ) and returns to the exploration of postwar adjustment that was the focus of Keeping Watch. Using the growth of the labor movement during the 1920s as a backdrop, she creates a community of characters whose motives and behaviors stem from their World War I experiences. At the center of the action is Cornwall resident Bennett Grey, a man with an uncanny ability to sense turmoil and deception within other individuals. Acquired after he sustained battle injuries, Grey's gift makes him an invaluable tool for F.B.I. agent Harris Stuyvesant, who is bent on tracking down the suspected British source of sophisticated incendiary devices used in more than one violent union confrontation on American soil, but it causes Grey both physical and mental distress. Realistic psychological drama, strong research, and impeccable writing style make this a tale not to be missed. Highly recommended.—Nancy McNicol, Hamden P.L., CT

Set shortly before Britain's disastrous General Strike of 1926, this stand-alone thriller from bestseller King (Keeping Watch ) offers impeccable scholarship and the author's usual intelligent prose, but a surfeit of period detail and some weighty themes—the gulf between rich and poor, the insidious nature of both terrorism and the efforts to curb it—overpower the thin plot and stock characters. When Harris Stuyvesant, an investigator for the U.S. Justice Department, arrives in London to look for the mastermind behind a series of terrorist bombings on American soil, he tells Aldous Carstairs, a sinister government official, that his prime suspect is Labour Party leader Richard Bunsen. Carstairs suggests Stuyvesant should talk to Bennett Grey, whose brush with death during WWI has heightened his sense of perception to the point that he's a kind of human lie detector (he's the "touchstone" of the title), and to Lady Laura Hurleigh, Bunsen's lover and a passionate advocate of his brand of socialism. The threat of violence at a secret summit meeting held at the Hurleigh family's country house about preventing the strike provides some mild suspense. (Jan.)