The Beekeeper's Apprentice

This turned out to be a very welcome addition to the Sherlock Holmes canon. I've steered clear of this kind of thing for a long time after Nicholas Meyer's lackluster additions to it, but I finally broke down and picked up this book.

I've always enjoyed Ms. King's works and this turned out to be no

Show More

exception. The characters are very well drawn. Mary Russell is immediately believable as a young woman in the mold of Holmes and Holmes, himself, is completely in character with his Doylesian counterpart. One thing I found immensely enjoyable was that, while the author took no liberties with Holmes' character, she took a lot with his perception of Watson. While no one could doubt the detective's obvious affection for the doctor in the Doyle books, it was sometimes a bit hard to believe he held much regard for him as a partner in detection. Fortunately, Sir Arthur didn't say too much on the subject, leaving Ms. King free to let Sherlock and Mary both love him for his innate goodness while still considering him more than a bit of a buffoon muddling along, usually in the wrong direction.

The mystery, itself, is serviceable. I was reasonably certain of the identity of the villain well before our heroes deduced it, but that didn't detract from my enjoyment of watching the investigation unfold. The writing, the characters and the background all served to make this a "read right through" book. I look forward to picking up the next volume.

Show Less

I loved this book to pieces, and as I read it I often felt a smile on my face. Sherlock Holmes purists might well howl, but as a fan of Arthur Conan Doyle myself, I thought King's knowledge and affection for the original was palpable. The book opens with an "Editor's Preface" from King disavowing

Show More

authorship and claiming the manuscripts turned up mysteriously on her doorstep. She claimed that even as a mystery writer she'd be chagrined to take responsibility for "the farfetched idea of Sherlock Holmes taking on a smart-mouthed, half-American, fifteen-year-old feminist sidekick."

Ah, but she pulls it off with such panache! That sidekick, Mary Todd Russell, is fifteen when she meets the then 54-year-old Holmes in 1915. In her "Author's Note" Russell explains any discrepancies: So yes, I freely admit that my Holmes is not the Holmes of Watson...The subject is essentially the same; it is the eyes and the hands of the artist that change. And that change is that Mary is fully Holmes equal in intellect, while she portrays Watson as good-hearted but dim. I think she (and King) are rather unfair to Watson in that.

However, that's a minor criticism in a book that otherwise was such a clever, enjoyable romp and succeeded as historical fiction, as mystery, as romance (Russell is 18 by the book's end when we get a glimmer of that) and as an alternate universe Holmes novel. I actually read other Mary Russell books before coming to read this one, the first in the series. Every single one I have read--my first was A Letter of Mary--has been a pleasure.

Show Less

Superb. Elegantly and well contrived pastiche. Not exactly believable, but given the absurdity of the opening premise everything else follows supremely well.

The premise is that in 1915 Holmes has retired to the Sussex downs to raise his bees. Here he meets (and is nearly trod upon by) an orphaned

Show More

15yr old girl. She it turns out has an intelligence and the observational skills to match Holmes' own. (she'd been reading Virgil on the Downs hence her obliviousness to Holmes' presence when he's been studying the bees at ground level). Although both are reclusive by nature, a bond of familiarity grows between them, Holmes aiding her through the trials of university in the manner of a distance father - a figure that Mary has been missing for many years. Instead of Watson's well meaning but incapable and romantic notions, Holmes finds he has an assistant worthy and dependable in her own right.

I suspect this the first in a 10? book series may always prove to be the best as both characters are being established and more humour and details can be entertained than later in the series where such things will start to get repetitive. Holmes is cast very much in Conan Doyle's' style. He remains aloof and repressive of his emotions (although even here King allows a few more expressions of concern to creep in than Conan-Doyle would have done.) Mary is a study in contrasts, being born American there is the distinct bubliness of personality and youth in every touch - but of course her intellect allows her to evaluate the consequence of actions and withhold from guessing. As was always going to be the case, and naturally is the case with many retired professionals, Holmes cannot refrain from dabbling in a few little investigative actions , and once or twice Mary is there to assist. Holmes' patient teaching of the finer arts coming to the fore each time. Then Mary's room is bombed and suddenly what had been fun turns a whole lot more serious.

The setting and time is well chosen. England in 1915-1920 is a very different place than the pre-war period, and this allows Holmes and Mary the freedom that was would have been heavily constrained in an earlier period, but without imposing undue stretches of credulity on the readers. King's explanations of Holmes' deductive reasoning are far superior to Conan-Doyle's', especially in the ares where more than one possible conclusion can be drawn from the evidence. The other minor characters also all make an appearance (again some of these may have been more useful saved for later books?) and are again rue to form. Only Lestrade from Scotland Yard has changed - I think, although it was not explicitly stated - that this is his son. Brought up on tales of Holmes' powers he is far more accepting and accommodating than the original.

My sole gripe, and really the only one that can be raised other than the entire concept of the book, is that the major villain chosen for the end sequence of adventures is too predictable. Not that the actions or clues are predictable, but given the first tricky clue the obvious name springs to mind, and each successive encounter only highlights it. Disappointingly there is no grand denouncement of deductive reasoning - although given Watson's absence there is no need for it either. I suppose there is the slightly grating aspect of religion being forced into the storyline. At the moment it is little more than Mary's upbringing and her desire to stufy Theology, with Holmes remaing properly in the athiest camp. But it somethig to keep an eye out on in the later books. Other than this minor matter it is truly an excellent follow-on from the canon, and in many respects better.

If you've read the original Holmes go and read this. Superb. I will be reading more in this series.

Show Less

This is an affectionate and very entertaining romp through the fringes of Sherlock Holmes country, written by someone with a very good ear for the flow of the original Sherlock Holmes stories and the professional competence as a writer to get away with a pastiche that doesn't read like

Show More

internet-grade fan-fiction.

Most of the obvious flaws are not introduced by King, but stem from weaknesses in the original. Sir Arthur was writing sensational fiction to meet Edwardian popular tastes: a century later we're a bit less willing to accept plots that rely on disguises, obscure ciphered messages and the ability to follow a line of footprints across a busy London park. King's faithful revival of the format makes these weaknesses a bit more obvious. Bringing in an intelligent, assertive young woman — you notice how hard I'm trying not to use the word "feisty"? — as Holmes's pupil and counterpart helps to give us a modern slant on the stories, but it also exposes the trick behind the whole Holmes mystique: if you have two characters who are both logical reasoning machines with interesting flaws, you start to see how it's done. Modern detectives are expected to have a little more depth, really.

As well as being a mystery, this is also an historical novel, of course. And the great challenge of writing historical fiction set in the recent past is that a lot of your readers are going to be more or less familiar with the language, history, and conventions of the period. You don't necessarily have to write in pastiche period style, but you do have to be careful not to introduce words or descriptive details that jar with the illusion. This is tricky: sometimes the requirements of plausibility conflict with pure accuracy, and sometimes both have to take second place to the plot.

King does a pretty good job in this respect. She has covered herself in advance by leaving it unclear when the text is supposed to have been written and by giving her narrator a mixed Anglo-American background (this not only pleases the punters in the US, but also provides a good excuse for any inadvertent Americanisms). The setting in the last years of the great War is also a good choice, because it was a period in which there are plenty of examples of intelligent, dynamic young women making their mark on English society (Rebecca West, Dorothy L Sayers, the Pankhursts, Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain, etc., etc.).

The text has very few obvious anachronisms in it (one that annoyed me was "train station", an expression that didn't exist either in British or in American English until about 25 years ago). The most glaring anachronism I saw was a reference to the Welsh counties of Gwent and Powys, which were only created in the seventies (Monmouthshire, Brecon and Radnor would be right for the period). The language is occasionally a little bit awkward and stilted, but that can plausibly be explained away by the pernicious example of Doctor Watson's prose.

Oxford is dangerous ground, because we have so many first-hand accounts of it at that time, and because Oxford is a place where using the right names really matters if you are an undergraduate. King gets most of it right, but she does make a few slips. Saying "Balliol College" instead of "Balliol" in ordinary speech instantly marks you as an outsider. And no-one in the university would ever describe the vacation as a "holiday" (this is the only place in British English where the word "vacation" is used regularly). Some of the oddities of Mary's university career can perhaps be put down to wartime measures or the anomalous situation of the women's colleges at the time, but it's still a bit unlikely that an Oxford theology course of the time would satisfy someone who was primarily interested in Judaism, and extremely unlikely that an undergraduate would be given a key to her lodgings or be allowed to keep a car (even with Mycroft's influence). But those are details, and this is an escapist adventure story. We shouldn't look too closely...

Show Less

I'm annoyed that I wasted an entire day listening to this book. I'm currently at the point where she's in college and has just escaped from being caught disguising herself as an Indian. At this point, I've decided to quit and not throw away any more time on this nauseating piece of work. The main

Show More

flaw: the MAIN character. She's a Mary Sue, plain and simple - she's annoyingly 'perfect' and oh, so very talented in SO many areas. One reviewer described her as self-congratulatory - and that's quite true. She's self-congratulatory to the point of being annoying and downright unlikable. At first, I thought it was just me - that I had an erroneous perception about the character. But I've realized since then that I'm not alone in this outlook. When I cannot like the main protagonist of a story, it spells doom for the entire book. That's when it's time to stop. So goodbye, Mary Russell - wish I'd never known you.

Show Less

This book - the first in a series - tells the story of teenaged Mary Russell who - literally - stumbled upon a man in the English countryside during WWI, only to discover the man was the famous Sherlock Holmes. Russell and Holmes, as they come to address one another, become friends and Holmes

Show More

begins to apprentice Russell in the art of detection. Over the next 5 years, their relationship continues to grow and Russell provides assistance to Holmes on several small cases. The turning point occurs when Russell steps outside of Holmes' control and takes action on her own which resolves a particularly sensitive case. The story, and their relationship, continues to evolve then until the two are no longer adult teacher and young pupil, but have become two adult equal partners.

I've actually never read any of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes books, so my only knowledge of this character is from references to him in popular culture. I can't say if that has affected my enjoyment of this book one way or the other. All I can say is that I did enjoy the book very much. The beginning of the story dragged a bit, as all the groundwork was being laid and characters were introduced. But once that chore was complete, the book sailed along delightfully. The character Holmes came across as the fictionalization of a factual person - to me who was not "personally" acquainted with the famous character. The other characters are perfect. The setting in the WWI period was vividly drawn. I loved it. Looking forward to the next book.

Show Less

The Beekeeper's Apprentice (and its sequels) were recommended to me after I started reading The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume I. I am most definitely grateful for that recommendation as it pointed me in the direction of a very charming and entertaining book. Mary Russell is a wonderful character

Show More

and narrator, and I look forward to reading more in this series.

Show Less

I love, love, love this series. I read this book over and over - even though I already know the whodunit by this time! The characters are so compelling, the story so well written, and the wit so sparkling that I can't keep away from it.

To be honest, I read some of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock

Show More

stories after I ran out of this series, and I found King's work more appealing. Her Holmes is more interesting, more nuanced, and the plot twists are much less predictable.

Show Less

I always do a terrible job any time I try and describe this book. The concept being such as infuriates certain purists. Happily, I love pastiche. And this is a gem of a book. A perfectly captured memory. Like those faded snapshots from a documentary. Faded and yet fierce intelligent eyes gaze out

Show More

at you all the same.

The story is simple, a jewish teenager, Mary Russell, recently orphaned, wanders the 1915 Suffolk downs with her head in her book. She literally stumbles over a tall thin middle aged man daubing honey bees with paint, so he can track them

He insults. She insults. Fierce intelligences find a match in friendship.

I suppose I should mention, which is why it’s always hard to describe, that the man is Sherlock Holmes. Biting, sarcastic, witty, brilliant, fascinating. He becomes Mary’s teacher and mentor, molding brilliant precocious clay into, well not quite, a detective. She’d rather be studying theology.

The story is told first person, as if from a perspective of great age. However, time has not dimmed the emotions involved. There is an incredible sense of shifting, flowering. A sense of a girl becoming a woman at the same time that a new terrible, wonderful age is being born. An age where a generation of young men poured their lives and youth into the trenches. An age when monstrous regiments of women agitated for an equal say in government and education and life. An age when old ways of life convulsed giving birth to the new. An age when Sherlock Holmes, a pre-curser of the new age and yet a relic of the old, sits on the Suffolk Downs with a seventeen year old girl playing chess while bombs in distant Belgium echo faintly across the channel.

It’s a book that tastes like wild honey, golden, sweet and smooth with just a touch of bittersweet. Plus, with the interesting mysteries and the adventures and some such.

Show Less

Ms. King gives us Mary Russell, an American teenager whose parents have died, and whose aunt takes her to a remote rural location in Britain. Mary wanders around the area and discovers that one of her neighbors is Sherlock Holmes, retired from detecting and now focused on raising bees and

Show More

conducting scientific experiments. Holmes recognizes the girl's restless intelligence and their relationship develops as he secretly provides her with an education in detecting.

Mary's skills are called into play when an American diplomat's daughter is kidnapped. She proves herself nearly Holmes's equal in deduction and quick action. This is just a warm-up for the case of her young life, in which an advresary seems bent on destroying all Holmes holds dear, including Mary and John Watson.

Mary is well drawn if a bit too wonderful. She is a more interesting companion for Holmes than Watson, who despite his devotion was never in Holmes's league as a thinker. Holmes in this version is more or less "according to Doyle" (if not Holye). His growing apreciation of Mary's abilities is an opportunity for him to grow a bit.

King's style fits well with the characterizations and story. A very enjoyable read.

Show Less

I know I read some, maybe all, of the Holmes stories when I was a kid. My knowledge of Sherlock Holmes is mostly from the movies, though, including that unfortunate picture in which Basil Rathbone, I mean Holmes, fights the Nazis. (I just googled and there are three Holmes vs. Nazi movies, for

Show More

god's sake.)

Anyway, this is a perfectly adequate mystery, but it's more about the relationship between Holmes and Mary Russell than about the mystery. I got kind of tired of the slow pace and the stilted Edwardian language, though it's well done and feels accurate.

Russell is way too much of a Mary Sue to take seriously: rich, brainy, and beautiful, with a tragic past. She's supposedly under her aunt's control, but she seems to do whatever she wants. Everyone from her tutors to Watson and Mycroft Holmes adore her (you'd think, given the era, they'd just dismiss her as an annoyance.)

She's incredibly open minded and liberal for her time. When she and Holmes travel to Palestine you'd expect a young lady of her time and place to have disparaging things to say about filthy Arabs and that sort of thing, not to mention when they mix with working class people and impersonate Gipsys [sic]. And surely a Jewish scholar of theology would refer to reading a copy of "the Pentateuch," not the "Jewish bible".

Another problem is that just like in the Basil Rathbone movies, Watson is condescendingly treated like a doddering moron. Jeeze, he's a doctor, he can't be that dumb. I figure he must be pretty smart, if Holmes hangs around with him. He's just not as smart as Holmes.

Well, people like spunky heroines, so I can see why they like this series. Lots of reviews by young women who profess their adoration of Mary Russell. But it's not for me. It's not the kind of psychological mystery (i.e., Ruth Rendell) that I like, so I'm not going to bother with the other books in the series. Too bad I bought more (used, but still) when I got this one.

I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that Holmes and Russell are going to get married in some later book. In many ways that seems less interesting than if they didn't. Say they realize they're too similar to be a good couple, a la Jo March and Laurie What's his name, or that they're both too autistic to care about each other "that way". Or if one or both of them declared themself asexual and not interested in romance. Or Mary is a Lesbian, which explains some of why she so readily dresses up in male clothing and impersonates a boy! I think I like that one the best. No, wait, Holmes has a thing for working class rent boys and this becomes part of their sex play. "'Ullo, gov'nor, got a warm place where a poor boy from the country could stay the night? Say, you dropped your pipe, why here it is. Summat else I could do for you while I'm down there?"

Anyway, far more interesting if the books would explore the tensions with those situations, or how one of them falls in love with someone else and that affects their partnership. But no, it's the usual everything leads to romance plot.

Show Less

The central conceit of this book is that Sherlock Holmes is a real person - the stories written by Dr. Watson who was mentored by Conan Doyle are a fictional take on what really happened - who has retired to a life of beekeeping in the English countryside. He meets Mary Russell, a young girl who he

Show More

slowly trains to be his assistant - more a Robin than a Watson. By now it is the early 1920s and we are off and running.

Laurie King has developed a writing style reminiscent of Conan Doyle and makes her stories as seamless as possible with the Canon (as the great Sherlock Holmes stories are collectively referred to).

This is a great original idea. The stories are well executed and thrilling without being fantastical, probing the psychology of Holmes and Russell and their growing relationship very well. This is the first book in a very successful series, suffering slightly from too much scene-setting and ‘origins’ exposition, but very entertaining nonetheless.

Show Less

So I finally got around to reading these famous books. Two of them, anyway. And they're horrible. Not badly written, but our hero and heroine are unbearable company. King manages to make Sherlock Holmes even less sympathetic than Doyle did, which is impressive (and I love the original Holmes

Show More

stories, but he's not supposed to be a pleasant person in them), and Mary Russell is absolutely vile. All she does is talk about how brilliant she is and how stupid everyone else, especially Watson, is. We are also supposed to believe that her aunt treats her abominably for no reason, and then we find out that she once punched said aunt in the face. I would call that a reason, personally.

Upon finishing this (oh, and the mystery isn't that hard to solve, given that the villain is leaving them deliberate clues all along, wanting to be caught), I was furious that I'd already purchased another one in the series. Duty calls!

Show Less

This book is the first of a series in which Sherlock Holmes - "retired" to beekeeping in the country - meets the narrator/protagonist Mary Russell and takes her on as his apprentice. Since Russell's intelligence and powers of observation match Holmes the relationship seems to be missing something

Show More

as they are both almost too perfect (King allows both her characters to make some mistakes to make them a little complementary). Much of the early half of the book involves Russell's long apprenticeship and training and drags. There are a number of mysteries to solve and the novel becomes episodic as a result. The conclusion actually tries to tie these mysteries together which doesn't work for me. I wanted to like this book but just found it a bit dull. Still, I still see promise that maybe future installments could be better now that this backstory is filled in.

Show Less

One of my favorites, I admit. I do like Mary Russell so very much, although I get the impression she'd hate me if we were ever in the same room.

That a middle-aged retired detective and a teenaged bookish school girl are essentially kindred spirits is really the core of this tale, and perhaps the mystery that haunts the series. Though separated by decades in age, their minds and beings could not be closer. Author Laurie R. King does a

Show More

masterful job in bringing new life to Sherlock Holmes and in the creation of his new associate, Mary Russell. A complex case for Holmes and Russell to solve is expertly woven through the beginnings of the creation of their friendship. This series maybe not properly be in the Holmes canon, but it will stand the test of time in its own right.

Show Less

When we first meet Mary Russell, she is a 15-year-old orphan, walking the Sussex Downs near her farm in England. She nearly trips over an “old man,” and soon deduces that he is the retired detective Sherlock Holmes. Mary quickly impresses Holmes with her powers of deduction and a friendship

Show More

begins. It isn’t long before there is a “minor” case of burglary in the area, which Mary is able to solve, and this cements their relationship and increases Holmes’s interest in taking her on formally as his apprentice.

This is a clever and interesting take-off on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s works featuring Holmes and Dr Watson. Unlike Watson, Mary is close to Holmes’s equal in deductive reasoning and powers of observation. She is quick witted, intelligent, assertive, a good actress, and physically strong and agile. I like that King has this work span several years, allowing for some needed maturation of Mary before she is fully tested. I think she behaves in a manner consistent with her age, social standing, experience, and emotional growth. If I had any complaint with Doyle’s Sherlock it was his superior attitude, but seen through Mary’s eyes, I can more easily tolerate his “all-knowing” persona. It helps that in his “old age” Holmes misses a clue or two which Mary catches and points out to him. Way to go, Mary!

The action was a bit slow in places, but I think King needed time to set up her characters and their relationship, so I’m okay with that. It was relatively faithful to Doyle’s style, and, as it is written in first person (as Mary’s recollections), I would expect that kind of pacing and sentence structure. My only regret is that I waited so long to get to this book. I look forward to more of this series

Show Less

The first of Laurie King's Mary Russell mysteries in which King creates a partner for Sherlock Holmes, this book is a must for any Holmes fan. It is a fine mystery in its own right, well written and evokes the aura of analytical mastery of which Holmes was endowed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Russell

Show More

is the main character, here being introduced and paired with the great detective who, while in retirement, is still active. King avoids trying to write yet another Sherlock Holmes mystery by shifting the attention to Russell yet still involving Holmes almost equally. While I am not a rabid mystery fan, I am a fan of Sherlock Holmes and this book earns a rare five-star rating from me.

Show Less

I was quite surprised at my joy in this book.

It pulls off the usage of Sherlock Holmes well - something that has the potential to be quite cheesy. Goes into enough detail to seem realistic and hold interest whilst still being light enough for an enjoyable summer read.

[The Beekeeper’s Apprentice]
[[Laurie King]]

First in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes series.

The year is 1915. Mary Russell, the 15 year old daughter of an American Gentile father and an English Jewish mother, who was orphaned the year before due to a terrible car accident that wiped out the rest

Show More

of her family, is now living in England with her aunt at her family’s home in Sussex. Striding along the Downs with her nose in a book, Russell inadvertently steps on a reclining form--that of Sherlock Holmes.

Thus starts the beginning of a remarkable relationship and a four-year apprenticeship for the lonely, brilliant, prickly Russell under the most famous detective of modern times. Towards the end, she begins an academic career at Oxford, studying Theology (to the disgust of Holmes who grumbles that it’s a waste of her mind), and also begins applying what she has learned in a series of interesting cases.

I’ve never read one single book or story about Sherlock Holmes and still don’t want to, because I want nothing to interfere with my picture of Holmes and his equally fictional “apprentice”, Mary Russell. King does an absolutely brilliant job of evoking both Holmes and Russell, developing characters that are totally believable and a story line that is gripping. King also uses England during World War I as an effective backdrop for the story.

The last of Russell’s apprenticeship cases is so perilous that the two flee England in 1919 to Palestine for a brief time, which is the subject of what I think is the best book in the series, O Jerusalem. In fact, in my rereads of the series, I have taken to stopping at this point in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice and reading O Jerusalem; although it is the 4th book that King wrote for the series, I find that I’d rather read it at this point than continue with the next two books before O Jerusalem. I do urge those who have never read the series to do the same, because it makes perfect sense in the development of the story line. However, the events in that book are summarized briefly in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice in a way that reveals nothing of what happened, and the first book finishes with Russell and Holmes returning to England in a wonderfully exciting, page-turning climax.

The writing is superb, the plotting excellent, the characters totally engaging. A must read for those who enjoy period mystery/police procedurals. Highly recommended.

Show Less

“I freely admit that my Holmes is not the Holmes of Watson,” announces Mary Russell in the preliminary pages of Laurie B. King’s novel The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and she is absolutely right. Her Sherlock Holmes is not the man John Watson wrote so fondly of, and it becomes the Achilles heel

Show More

of an otherwise superficially entertaining mystery.
As a genre all its own, the Sherlock Holmes pastiche may have no equal (with the potential exception of H.P. Lovecraft’s memorable Cthulhu mythos). There is something indefinably singular about the exploits of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Detective and his companion Watson that captures the imagination of both readers and writers alike; as a result, there are now more books starring Holmes than Doyle ever published. It seems almost a mandate that authors must, at some time, try their hand at breathing new life into Doyle’s creation. And well they should; no character, no matter how beloved, is above a little literary tinkering now and then.
The results range from the typically fawning to the invigoratingly bold, some authors remaining content to emulate while others move to broaden the parameters of the canon. Nicholas Meyer adhered slavishly to Doyle’s writing style in his enjoyable thrillers The Seven Percent Solution and The West End Horror. Stephen King twisted the format slightly, allowing Watson his only success at one-upping Holmes in the short story “The Doctor’s Case.” Michael Chabon – winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and possibly the most acclaimed author to continue Holmes’ exploits – gifted the public with The Final Solution, portraying Sherlock as an elderly, anonymous eccentric attempting to solve the mystery of a mute Jewish boy and his talkative parrot during the declining years of World War II.
Laurie B. King takes the revisionist tact, relocating Holmes in time to the era of World War I, and adding a decidedly feminist slant to the (up to this point) determinedly male exploits of Holmes and Watson. King explains the necessity for such an innovative variation thusly: “During the war the very fabric of English society was picked apart and rewoven. Necessity dictated that women outside the home, be it on their own of that of their employers’, and so women put on men’s boots and took control of trams and breweries, factories and fields." Consequently, King sets about meshing the nineteenth-century charms of Holmes with the slightly more modern sensibilities of an early-twentieth century woman
Specifically, King introduces Holmes to Mary Russell, a wildly precocious teenager who exhibits a level of intelligence remarkably parallel to that of Holmes. Thankfully, King sidesteps the worrisome possibility of a Sherlock Holmes Meets Nancy Drew scenario, quickly aging Russell into a mature, gifted, and decidedly headstrong young woman. As Holmes takes her under his tutelage, they find themselves the targets of a mysterious bomber who taunts them with intentional clues, challenging their considerable intellects in a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse.
Suffice to say, the plot unravels in classic Holmesian fashion; the clues are laid out, the identity of the assassin is shrouded and bizarre, and throughout it all, Holmes (and Russell) demonstrate instances of brainpower that would boggle lesser detectives. Doyle was never above using an intensely convoluted plot to keep the reader guessing, and King meets this challenge admirably.
Where King falters, and badly, is in her complete re-imagining of Holmes. There is no reason to bemoan the fact that she never captures the tenor of Doyle’s writing style; after all, Doyle’s tales were narrated in the distinctive words of Watson, whereas Russell’s narration takes a far more modern tone. The quality of Doyle’s writing was not the element that made his tales unique, and indeed King is no remarkable stylist herself. What made the tales memorable was Holmes himself, and King’s interpretation of the investigator is wholly unsatisfying. Claiming that Watson was an inferior chronicler cursed with “an inability to know a gem unless it be set in gaudy gold,” Russell describes Holmes as a friendly, loveable curmudgeon, slightly aloof, yet tender and affectionate. In essence, King removes everything that made Holmes Holmes; his irascibility, his coldness, his fascinating strangeness. By re-sculpting the legend into a friendlier shadow of his former self, King betrays him. Doyle’s detective was distinct: King’s detective is a cousin to the television detectives of Diagnosis Murder and Murder, She Wrote. If she had not named the character Sherlock Holmes, he would be well-nigh indistinguishable from the multitudes of airplane-literature detectives who entertain passengers between flights.
In the end, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is a passable entertainment, nothing more. It might be too much to expect King to match Doyle in terms of quality, but there exist certain responsibilities when tinkering with a legend. And when quality offerings such as Chabon’s Final Solution, Caleb Carr’s The Italian Secretary, and Mitch Cullin’s A Slight Trick of the Mind are readily available, the overall value of King’s offering is negligent indeed. As Holmes might have put it, the choice is elementary.

Show Less

This is one of my favorite mystery series and I have all of the Mary Russel novels! Intelligently drawn characters, wit and mystery, historically relevent backdrops to the plots--this series is great.

King is giving us bit by bit the story of Mary Russell, apprentice to the great Sherlock Holmes. The stories are not coming out chronologically, but that seems to work. King is not under pressure to fill in every gap and is able to develop stories independent of chronology. I read this book after A

Show More

Monstruous Regiment of Women, and on the strength of the story in that. The characterization is strong, the story is very good, and not too far off from the original material except that Mary is Holmes's equal as opposed to the good-natured but bumbling Watson. This, of course, makes the reader feel a bit smarter, because you identify with the narrator. I have also read from her other series about Kate Martinelli, which are also good, I just happen to prefer period lit.

Show Less

I really liked this book. As a huge fan of sherlock holmes in my younger years.. i really worried about whether i would like someone else resurrecting him... i thought it was well done and a lot of fun. I look forward to reading more in the series.