There are a two handfuls of secondary characters who serve the mystery case or help to fill out the world. Watson ) who helps to set-up our Sherlock Holmes, and Lord Ingram who weaves in our little thread of romance. There's a handful of main stay characters, an Inspector that brings the reader through the main mystery case, Charlotte's sister Livia who welcomes us into the world, Mrs. There's one main mystery case needing to be solved with other little ones sprinkled in as new characters get introduced. Our main character Charlotte Holmes takes her time coming to the forefront but after I finished the book, I think this choice really worked, but I needed hindsight to appreciate it. The beginning was a bit schizophrenic to me and I had a little tougher time sliding into Thomas' world. With more historical mystery elements than romance, this new spin on an old classic character was immensely intriguing. How had they managed to not realize, for so long, what they meant to one another? And why then must they see the light when it was too late, when they could possess no more than a few moments of ferocious mutual awareness?
That was mostly my own idiosyncratic bugaboo (though I did think the story took a little while to get going.) I expect I will carry on with the series at some point.***For Book Club Read more The book is really a twist on the idea of Sherlock, not so much on the stories themselves (at least so far), despite the nods to cannon. It also took me a while to figure out that Thomas was telling her own version of a Sherlock-like character and that the "real" Sherlock known to readers of Conan Doyle was never going to show up. If I had any real disappointments in the book, it was that I didn't see much commentary on the Holmes stories within this telling, and that is one of the joys of retellings for me. The mystery itself was also satisfying, and Thomas has a deft hand at misdirection. The callbacks to the Sherlock cannon were fun, and I suspect, being mostly familiar with Holmes through adaptations and not the original source material, that I missed quite a few. The characterization was also good, and I especially enjoyed the relationship between Charlotte and her sister and between Charlotte and Mrs Watson. I enjoyed the story a good deal, especially the ways it follows various "ruined" or otherwise ostracized women in the late 19th century and explores their options and the strictures under which they lived. As we see how all that is coming about, Charlotte also solves a fairly twisty little mystery.
This first book in the Lady Sherlock series establishes the premise of the series, showing how a young woman named Charlotte Holmes comes to set herself up as a kind of consulting detective under the guise of one "Sherlock" Holmes.
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