Laurie R. King’s The Beekeeper’s Apprentice
Retired Holmes, keeping bees in Sussex, takes on a fifteen-year-old apprentice.
Holmes continued is more interesting than Holmes imitated, so give him a pupil who might be his equal.
You want Holmes continued rather than repeated, and you would be glad of a long series to follow.
What it keeps and what it changes
Keeps: Holmes, now retired to the Sussex Downs and studying bees, as the canon leaves him.
Changes: the narrator and the hero: it is 1915, and Mary Russell, orphaned and fifteen, tells the story and becomes his partner.
Whose story is it?
Mary Russell’s.
How much time does it ask?
368 pages, the first of a long-running series of Mary Russell novels.
Picador paperback, 27 May 2014: A Mary Russell Mystery #1.
Where to find it
Buy the paperback — Bookshop.org
Other ways to get it: Paperback — Amazon · Ebook — Kobo · Kindle — Amazon
Borrow it free: Borrow on Libby · Find at your library — WorldCat
More versions: The Complete Novels and Stories, Bantam Classics (two volumes) · The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Oxford World’s Classics (2025) · The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oxford World’s Classics (2023)