The Beekeepers Apprentice or: On the Segregation of the Queen

I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen years old with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him. In this first of the “Russell Memoirs,” young Mary encounters a retired Sherlock Holmes during the first year of the Great War, and impresses him enough that, reluctantly, he takes her on as his apprentice. It takes a great deal of adjustment—on both sides.

He said nothing. Very sarcastically.

But Russell, as he comes to call her, matures into an Oxford undergraduate with her own strengths and interests—I crawled into my books and pulled the pages up over my head.—until danger comes out of nowhere, and threatens their partnership, and their very lives.