The Language of Bees
Author | Laurie R. King |
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Language | English |
Series | Mary Russell |
Genre | Detective fiction |
Publisher | ![]() |
Publication date | 2009 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (Hardback) |
ISBN | 0553804545 |
Preceded by | Locked Rooms |
Followed by | The God of the Hive |
The Language of Bees is a 2009 mystery novel by American author Laurie R. King featuring detectives Mary Russell and her husband Sherlock Holmes. This novel is the ninth in this literary series. Events in the novel follow immediately after those found in King’s 2005's bestselling Locked Rooms.
Plot summary
Russell and Holmes return to their home in Sussex, England in 1924 after seven months abroad in India, Japan and California. The novel features a domestic mystery as a hive on Holmes’s farm has been repetitively swarming and a colony of bees is found to have disappeared. Action shifts, however, with the reappearance of Damian Adler, a talented young painter and emotionally disturbed veteran of World War I, first introduced in the second book in the series. Adler is Holmes' estranged son, born to Irene Adler in about 1895. The distraught Adler seeks the couple's help in locating his missing wife Yolanda and their daughter Estelle.
Russell and Holmes separate during the investigation and Russell undertakes to search out Damien's questionable past. The search involves the British practitioners of a religious cult called The Children of Lights with roots in Shanghai, China and features locations ranging from Bohemian London to the wilds of Scotland. Russell experiences a harrowing trip by aeroplane. A series of bodies, some dead by suicide and others ritually sacrificed, appear. While the climax of the novel, in a ancient circle of standing stones on Orkney Island, brings some plot resolution, the story continues in the upcoming 2010 The God of the Hive.