Sherlock Holmes and the legacy of ‘The Woman’

  Readers who love their Sherlock Holmes know there's only one character in the Arthur Conan Doyle canon worthy of the title "The Woman."
  In a scandal involving Bohemian royalty, she became one of the few adversaries to best the great detective, who ever after kept a reminder of her dangling from his watch chain.
  Author Laurie R. King revisits the relationship between Holmes and opera singer Irene Adler in "The Language of Bees," a novel that supposes the two eventually reunited, only to part again without Holmes knowing that he had fathered a son.
  That's the relationship that launches "The Language of Bees," the newly released ninth installment of a series that unites Holmes with another improbable woman — Mary Russell, religious scholar and Holmes' equal when it comes to observation and intellect. First as mentor and student, then as husband and wife, the two have tackled mysteries of world import from the Holy Land to San Francisco. When they finally return home to their Sussex cottage at the novel's start, Holmes and Russell find the detective's adult son on their doorstep, seeking help in the mysterious disappearance of his wife and daughter.
  Suspense, tension and an intriguing mystery rooted in a bizarre religious cult all work to make "The Language of Bees" one of the best in the series. We see Holmes in the almost unthinkable role of father, struggling to help a son who's both admiring and resentful. And Damian Adler proves to be the most unlikely of sons to the eminently rational Holmes. He's a Bohemian surrealist painter who's taken a Chinese wife. He's also a traumatized WWI veteran who's been tried once for murder.
  King also shows us a Russell who's fighting to trust herself again after the shattering personal revelations of "Locked Rooms," the eighth novel in the series that forced her to confront the truth about how her family died. Her journey to find herself ultimately leads to the discovery of who's behind the disappearance of Adler's family.
  I'd be remiss not to warn readers that King essentially begins at the end of one story and ends in the middle of another. In a word, this book is a cliffhanger. Of course, the unspoken pact between readers and the authors of cliffhangers is that the next installment will be delivered posthaste. I can only hope that King is hard at work. Because I need to know what happens next. Soon.