Holmes Behind the Veil

“The Sussex Beekeeper at the Dawn of Time” is an unconventional and breath-taking tour de force that flirts with the crossover and steampunk genres. The book knits together a transcribed oral memoir, newspaper clippings, and myriad letters and journal pages from across two millennia, much of it held together by the pithy comments of a certain elderly beekeeper residing in Sussex, England. While comparatively few, these notes are nonetheless the essential marble skeleton on which the whole denouement and structure of the book hangs. In a sense, much of this book comprises a straightforward objective record of the excavation of "historical" minutiae and "forgotten" manuscripts. But then those mildewed scraps of parchment, paper, and scrolls are assembled into something far greater than the sum of their parts...