"King has stepped onto the sacred literary preserve of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, poached Holmes, and brilliantly brought him to life again." --The Washington Post Book World

"A fascinating and often moving account of a friendship so unusual and so compelling that one almost accepts it as being historically real." -- The Denver Post

"Enchanting... The Beekeeper's Apprentice is real Laurie R. King, not faux Conan Doyle, and for my money, it's better than the original." -- San Jose Mercury News

"Rousing...Riveting...Suspenseful." -- Chicago Sun-Times

In 1915, long since retired from his crime-fighting days, Sherlock Holmes is engaged in a reclusive study of honeybees on the Sussex Downs. Never did the Victorian detective think to meet an intellect matching his own-until his acquaintance with Miss Mary Russell, a young twentieth-century lady whose mental acuity is equaled only by her penchant for deduction, disguises, and danger. Under Holmes's reluctant tutelage,
Russell embarks on a case involving a landowner's mysterious fever and the kidnapping of an American senator's daughter in the wilds of Wales. Then a near-fatal bomb on her doorstep-and another on Holmes's-sends the two sleuths on the trail of a murderer who scatters bizarre clues and seems utterly without motive. The villain's objective, however, is quite unequivocal: to end Russell and Holmes's partnership-and then their lives.