An Agatha Award Best Novel Nominee, and named One of the Century's Best 100 Mysteries by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, The Beekeeper's Apprentice: Or On the Segregation of the Queen/A Novel of Suspense Featuring Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes
by Laurie R. King will be available as a free download (PDF only) on April 1st and that's no joke. Visit the author's site on April 1st (don't worry, I'll remind you on Wednesday) for the full book or check now for a free sample. You'll have to convert the PDF to read it on your Kindle -- it isn't available yet in the Kindle Store.Synopsis
Sherlock Holmes meets his match in a formidable new enemy -- and his surprising new partner.
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.
