First published: 2009.

For Mary Russell and her husband, Sherlock Holmes, returning to the Sussex coast after seven months abroad was especially sweet. There was even a mystery to solve - the unexplained disappearance of an entire colony of bees from one of Holmes?s beloved hives. But the anticipated sweetness of their homecoming is quickly tempered by a galling memory from the past. Mary had met Damian Adler only once before, when the surrealist painter had been charged with - and exonerated from - murder. Now the troubled young man is enlisting the Holmeses? help again, this time in a desperate search for his missing wife and child.