audiobook reviewed
Narrator: Kate Reading
#1 in a series
Mystery
1860s
England
A Study in Scarlet
Women is, in essence, a gender-flipped
Sherlock Holmes story. Right there, I wanted to read it. The premise of this
novel is that Charlotte Holmes is a brilliant woman and has no interest
whatsoever in marriage. She’s told her father so and they made a deal - if she
makes a genuine effort to find a suitor and let him make her fall in love with
him and she still doesn’t want to get married, when she is 25, he will pay for
the education she needs to set up shop as the headmistress of a girls’ boarding
school. Charlotte holds up her end of the bargain; her father does not. So she
takes matters into her own hands and has an affair with a married man, thus
ruining her reputation and rendering her unfit for marriage.
Yay, idiotic Victorian morality! She has no intention, either, of being
imprisoned at their family’s country estate forever, so she runs away to London
where she intends to support herself as a typist. Eventually she meets Mrs Watson,
who hires her as her companion. Mrs Watson convinces Charlotte to take on
clients as an investigator, pretending to be the sister of the bedridden man,
Sherlock Holmes.
The ruse works and Charlotte is able to support herself quite well by
solving mysteries. She is called in on one case that strikes close to home when
suspicion falls on her sister, Livia, who had publicly accused the mother of
Charlotte’s lover of ruining her sister’s life, and hours later, the woman was
dead. When two other people die mysteriously, Charlotte and an Inspector
Treadles work together to solve the mystery and figure out how the victims were
connected.
I enjoyed seeing a gender-flipped Sherlock. Charlotte is a woman who knows
what she wants and makes plans to get it. She has good body image and isn’t
worried about being stick thin. These are all good things about this novel.
There are a lot of strong and independent women, even being set in Victorian
London. I think that the mystery itself took too long to set up and get to,
though, and once we got to it, was unnecessarily convoluted. It was hard to
keep everyone straight and the ending was really complicated. I read a ton of
mysteries and am really good at keeping track of who’s who and it still
confused the hell out of me. I felt that the book’s strength was in the
character development, which was excellent for nearly every character we meet.
Though I didn’t feel the mystery part of the plot was terribly well done, the
rest made up for it and I am still looking forward to reading the rest of the
books in this series.
© Kristen McQuinn
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Sounds intriguing! Adding this one to my TBR list!
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