The Beekeeper’s Apprentice – Laurie R. King
Original title: The Beekeeper’s Apprentice (1994)
Swedish title: Drottningfällan
Series: Marry Russell and Sherlock Holmes #1
Next three books in the series: A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor
Publishing house: Allison & Busby

I waited to read this book because I wanted to read some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories first, to get to know the real Holmes. I didn’t have to have had read it before, but it was quite nice to have read some of the stories to know the references. I still have a lot of his stories to look forward too, though.

I like the way this book was written, it feels like Mary Russell is telling us her life story. When she start telling us something and remembers that ‘oh, you might need to know this first’, she tells us that before she continues to tell whatever she was planning to tell us. She also goes ahead and says stuff like ‘in the years to come, I learned that …” which also strengthen the feeling of Mary Russell telling us her life story. I like how it all is chronologic, but not quite,  it gives me a more genuine feeling of someone telling their story and not the feeling of someone pretending to be someone telling a story. If that makes sense.

When Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes first meet is Holmes retired from his crime solving career (sort of) and research bees instead, and Mary is a 15 year old girl that soon is going off to college. They like the way their brains stimulate each other, they can think with each other in a different way than they do with others.

The one thing I might have an hesitation towards in this book is their huge age gap (39 years if I remember correctly). In this book, their relationship is more teacher – student, father – daughter, but I know what is coming.

I read this book kind of slow, but it didn’t feel like it went slow. The language was different than the books I usually read in English, there were a lot of words I weren’t certain what they ment but I could understand the context. I am generally quite bad at looking words up while I read, in the sense that I usually do not do it, but there were a few times I did it in this book when I had a dictionary (phone) close by because I wanted to get the actual mening of something and not the general sense of the meaning. I am looking forward to reading this book in Swedish as well.

Am I going to read more books in this series? Definitely.