The Language of Bees

The Language of Bees is a mystery novel by the American writer Laurie R. King, published in 2009. It is the ninth book of her series about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, and its events follow closely on the novel that came before it, Locked Rooms.

Russell and Holmes return to their house in Sussex in 1924 after a long journey through India and Japan, expecting a quiet summer. Instead Holmes's son Damian, from a relationship he has never spoken about, arrives with news that his wife and daughter have vanished and that a man called Thomas Brothers has been leading a group of followers in the countryside. The investigation takes the two of them into a community organised around a charismatic leader, and then into a search that crosses the south of England and Scotland. King writes the series as the memoirs of an older Mary Russell, so the reader is aware from the start that the account was written after the events, and the relationship between the two detectives is as much the subject as the crime.

The series began with The Beekeeper's Apprentice in 1994, and King has written more than a dozen novels about the two characters along with collections of related stories.