The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is startlingly good. It is the first book in a series that features a retired Sherlock Holmes and his young, female apprentice. Mary Russell is about fifteen years old when she stumbles upon Holmes in the English countryside. She is feisty, with a whip-quick intelligence, and she naturally falls into the role of protégé. Time and training pass pretty idyllically, until Russell and Holmes are called in to solve a kidnapping. This involves costumes, heroics, and some Holmes-style deductions. There is also a destructive, mastermind villain who knows Holms and predicts his moves.
I love Laurie R. King’s writing in this series. She is so comfortable in the vernacular of the nineteen-teens and twenties, and she creates convincing settings to accompany her dimensional characters. She very naturally uses the words that I’ve never heard of, like tannin (thank you, Kindle built-in dictionary!). And she builds suspense and lays out clews (old timey British spelling) as one would hope from a modern Sherlock Holmes rendition.
I enjoyed the characters, the plotting, and the writing in this first book so much that I immediately picked up the second, and have the third coming soon. I rarely want to read a series one right after the other and my obsession with this one is a testament to its awesomness.
Read this if: you like Sherlock Holmes, you enjoy expertly crafted period fiction, or you wish you had been trained in the arts of detection from a young age.