Until the last few years, there had been quite a lot of bee-keeping in the Ashton Clearwater district. But lately nobody, except the sinister and solitary Heregroves, had managed to make their bees thrive.
This was tiresome for Sydney Silchester who had gone to the country to be on his own and undisturbed by friends and garrulous neighbors. It was even more tiresome for him when Mrs. Heregrove was stung to death by her husband's bees. His situation suddenly became fraught with mysterious terror when he met his extraordinary neighbor, Mr. Mycroft, a scientific apiarist who had made discoveries about Heregrove's bees which pointed to murder on wings.
Who is Mr. Mycroft? The true identity of this inscrutable old gentleman is a deep secret, but there are echoes of Baker Street in his voice, and a familiar gleam in his eyes that miss no clue. In A Taste for Honey, he meets one of the most sinister murderers of all time, and encounters one of the most fiendishly ingenious murder methods ever devised.
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Endorsements |
"More than 30 years before Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Percent Solution opened the floodgates of Sherlockian imitation, H.F. Heard's A Taste for Honey was the first significant book-length Sherlock Holmes pastiche, and it remains one of the very best. This new edition should be welcomed by all lovers of classic detective fiction." Jon L. Breen, noted mystery and crime-detective wiriter, scholar and critic
"The narrator of A Taste for Honey is a prissy dilettante who closely guards his privacy from the hubbub of the tranquil English village he has moved to. Mr. Silchester likes honey, is persnickety about its quality and therefore seeks out the only beekeeper in the neighborhood. But there is something odd about his supplier, who is unfriendlier than Silchester himself. When the beekeeper's wife dies horribly of bee stings, Silchester becomes the next-intended victim of a killer who is experimentally breeding fatal bees." February 9, 1981, Newsweek review
"I thought I knew all the tricks of the horror trade but I never expected to have my hair stand on end when a bee flew in through an open window... A triumph of ingenuity and horrific simplicity." Boris Karloff
"...the most original and enchanting crime story of the year." Christopher Morley
"A veritable triumph of modern mystery...packing plenty of horror." Will Cuppy, The New York Herald Tribune
"Slow-moving, whimsical, somewhat weightily allusive, this tale is definitely caviar to the general; in a sense, it may be called a bookman's book." New York Times Book Review
"Terrifying...perfectly done...The most original contribution in many years." Vincent Starrett
ISBN: 9781-57733-215-2