I recall reading one of this author’s 12 previous novels featuring the more modern fictional Sherlock Holmes. I remember no details of The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, but enjoyed it, so when my wife borrowed this one from the library, she thought I might like it. Set in 1924-25 on a cruise ship, then in Japan and Oxford, England, the venerable detective pursues international blackmailers and assorted criminals creating a black market in fake works of art.
But the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creation of Holmes has not aged well and his narrating wife, detective Mary Russell is also no master sleuth here. The plot is predictably convoluted, but very unrealistic with more loose ends than a worn-out hairpiece. It is never made clear why a particular book given to the English monarch by the de facto Japanese emperor is so valuable as to warrant theft, murder, and international scandal, nor is its site at end revealed, unless I missed that in all the revelations about fakes.
The details of the rigid, isolated, and hierarchical Japanese culture of the era are the most interesting depictions. The almost equally rigid world of upper crust England is also well displayed. “He was the sort of aristocrat in whom generations of in-breeding and privilege led to a belief that his ermine robes were not only deserved but proof of the rightness of the universe.”
Not a book that I can recommend to anyone unless you are addicted to the murder mystery genre. Even if you are, there are lots of better tales to choose from.
The Passionate Reader 