2024 mystery story, eighth of the Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte
Holmes is accused of murder, and the circumstances are explained in
flashback.
Even a regular reader of the series may have some trouble
keeping up; there's an awful lot going on here, and since it's over a
year since I read the previous book I did have some trouble
remembering who was who among the minor recurring characters.
There's also quite a lot of plot: Charlotte is asked by a police
contact to look into an old locked-room murder, but she also has to
try to track down the missing minion of an old enemy, now in genteel
imprisonment. And of course Moriarty is still lurking in the
background.
Indeed, I found the first few chapters surprisingly unengaging, and
put the book aside for a while. Things do pick up once the
investigation kicks in, and since Charlotte is mostly viewed through
others' eyes doing her work rather than explaining it, I found that
this book achieved what the Sherlock Holmes stories themselves mostly
do not: the portrayal of an extremely powerful mind at work, building
and modifying structures from a minimum of information.
That said, everyone has at least one secret, and most of them are up
to at least two hidden things, and it might have been helpful to take
notes. (There is a cast list at the start, which may be a good basis
for this, but many characters use aliases much of the time. And at
least one appears in the list twice under different names, because the
connection between them is a secret to be discovered later.)
I think it does all fit together in the end, but I didn't feel I was
staying on top of it the way I normally do with a mystery; this is
less a participatory puzzle, like most mysteries, and more an occasion
to look on with awe at the Great Detective. (Not exclusively, but
there's a lot of that. And to be fair I did enjoy it)
Very much for the series reader, and I don't mean that in a bad way,
but a newcomer would probably be lost in short order. If you enjoyed
book 7, carry on with book 8.