Laurie R. King is a master. How I failed to have known about her before, I don’t know. But my shelves will soon be crowded with as many of her books as I can cram in my shopping bag.

THE BEEKEEPER’S APPRENTICE (Bantam, $6.99 paperback) is the first in the Mary Russell series and begins when the bright young lady, all of fifteen, stumbles onto – literally – a retired Sherlock Holmes who is sitting on the side of the road watching bees.

Long gone from his Baker Street residence, Holmes has taken up beekeeping and a country home in Sussex Downs. And it isn’t long before he takes up Russell as his apprentice. Holmes is older, although as he tells Russell, Watson had greatly exaggerated his age in those infernal stories of his, so older is a relative term. When Russell finds him, he is 54, softening a bit with age – emotionally mostly, but he is also suffering from rheumatism and is perhaps not or maybe never was the infallible mind Watson portrayed. Not that he isn’t still a genius, just a flawed one. The violin is still there along with the pipe; although, the cocaine seems to have gone.

The first half of the book, told almost as a series of short stories, chronicles Russell’s education in Holmes’s hands. It is a fascinating novel structure that in addition to being enormously satisfying, allows King to cover many years in a single bound without resorting to unsatisfying summaries. The second half chronicles Russell and Holmes’s first case where they act as equal partners. It is a fascinating mind-bender of a puzzle but does not, as the original Doyle stories do, play unfairly with the reader. Someone much smarter than I could have figured out many of the major points. The end is climatic but doesn’t resort to outlandish spectacles as many mysteries do. King never breaks form, and what a form it is.

I couldn’t possibly recommend this novel more.