Excerpt from The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

Halloween is over, and I hope you found some great spooky and mystery reads the last couple of weeks. Now… looking forward to American Thanksgiving and Christmas. Tis the season!

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme. Read the rules and more teasers at The Purple Booker. Anyone can play along.

This week I am reading Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice: or, On the Segregation of the Queen (Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes Book 1). I’ve read a number of Sherlock Holmes mysteries, including one with a female Sherlock Holmes (Study in Scarlet Women). This one gives Sherlock a new apprentice, a young woman who meets him after his retirement and studies under his tutelage. There are a number of smaller mysteries within this book. I’m not sure whether that trend continues, or whether I am now onto the “main” mystery.

And I was horrified: Here I was, standing before a Legend, flinging insults at him, yapping about his ankles like a small dog worrying a bear. 

Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice

In 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly engaged in the study of honeybees in Sussex when a young woman literally stumbles onto him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently orphaned, the young Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock Holmes. Under his reluctant tutelage, this very modern, twentieth-century woman proves a deft protégée and a fitting partner for the Victorian detective. They are soon called to Wales to help Scotland Yard find the kidnapped daughter of an American senator, a case of international significance with clues that dip deep into Holmes’s past. Full of brilliant deduction, disguises, and danger, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, the first book of the Mary Russell–Sherlock Holmes mysteries, is “remarkably beguiling” (The Boston Globe).