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.