2017 short story in the Lady Sherlock series. A client has a
mysterious puzzle box…
It's very slight, but rather pleasing. The box has a letter
combination lock, which obviously Charlotte could solve at once – but
instead she uses her Sherlockian ability to understand what's going on
to work out the context and determine the actual right thing to do. It
shows both how much Charlotte works like Sherlock in terms of
observing and putting together clues, and how different she is in
terms of being able to work out people and relationships.
This could have been squeezed into the second book, but unlike the cases
that are there it's not tied to an overall plot, and it stands well
on its own. There's little or none of the seriousness of Charlotte's
situation as developed in the novels, so if you take this as a
starting point don't expect those books to be only more of the same,
but this does a good job of representing one of the strands that show
up there.
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