This book has achieved the remarkable - it's actually made me like Sherlock Holmes. The man, I mean, rather than the books. I've read a couple of those books and admittedly enjoyed them, but the main character always struck me as smug and mildly irritating. The Beekeeper's Apprentice does I think a better job at presenting him as a human being who, by the nature of his capacities, is somewhat distanced from the world around him... and it shows, too, the cost of that distancing. It's a sympathetic view, in other words, made more so by the mirroring of capacity with the narrator. Fifteen year old Mary has an intellect and a character to match Holmes, and these two isolated individuals, one of them starting out and the other staring retirement in the face, find understanding with each other. As they solve crimes, of course. And though I was interested in the crimes - and I enjoyed the further mirroring of the two fundamental father-daughter pairings here - it really was the relationship between the two leads that made this so enjoyable.