Angie's Reviews > A Study in Scarlet Women

Originally reviewed here @ Angieville

This is the first installment in Sherry Thomas' Lady Sherlock series—a gender-swapped retelling of Sherlock Holmes. So basically, my catnip. We are living in an excellent age when it comes to Holmes retellings. From Laurie King's Mary Russell books to Ellie Marney's Every series to the BBC's Sherlock, it's a feast of delights. And since I have been a Sherry Thomas fan for awhile now, I could hardly contain my excitement when I heard she was working on a female Holmes. The glowing cover blurb from Deanna Raybourn certainly didn't hurt.

Charlotte Holmes has taken the mother of all calculated risks and successfully gotten herself thrown out. It all started . . . well, ages ago, really. The youngest of four daughters, with parents who seem to hold nothing but disdain for one another, Charlotte isn't precisely the oddest one in the family. But that's not saying much. She is, however, the most determined to leave her parents' (and society's) expectations behind and embark on the kind of life she has always wanted. The devil, of course, is in the details. And it isn't long before the grim reality of life as a woman alone on the streets of London and in search of respectable work begins to take its toll, particularly as Charlotte is determined to support not only herself but her two sisters as well. However, her sharp intellect and dispassionate approach to humans in general see her in good stead. And if an old friend (and longtime sparring partner) occasionally has her followed for his own reasons, Charlotte can handle it. But when a series of mysterious deaths begin to resemble a connection of sorts, and when her beloved sister Livia's name gets dragged into the mix, Charlotte immediately steps in to clear her sister's name and solve the mystery. Woven through the hunt for the killer are the enigmatic Mrs. Watson, the dogged Inspector Treadles, and the old friend who is never far from her thoughts.

I'll just go ahead and start by saying A Study in Scarlet Women was not at all what I expected! And that is by no means a bad thing. I enjoyed every bit of this twisty, dense, and unconventional tale. I think I just happened to go in with certain assumed parameters, and Sherry Thomas happily conformed to none of them. The story's timeline is quite fluid, and the reader is definitely expected to keep up on several levels. The narrative hops around at will from one point of view to the next, and it is up to Charlotte (when we are with her) and the reader to tease apart and piece back together the many tangled threads. Charlotte herself was a revelation, if an incredibly self-contained one:

Charlotte left her seat and walked to a window. It gave onto the same street where Miss Hartford's carriage had been parked, waiting for her return. The carriage was gone, but in its place, a man stood underneath a streetlamp, reading a newspaper.

At first, she thought he was the man from the carriage. Instead, she recognized him as the one who had waited out the rain across the street from her earlier in the afternoon.

The one she'd suspected of following her.

She was not alarmed. Whoever had commissioned the man's service had not done so with the intention of harming her, but to keep an eye on her.

This did not make her happy—she did not care to be closely monitored. She wasn't angry at the person responsible for this surveillance—in his place she might have done the same. Nevertheless, she wished her secret guardian hadn't felt compelled to be so positioned as to be able to effect a rescue at any moment.

It implied that such a rescue was not only necessary, but imminent.

That she couldn't in good conscience—or cold logic—disagree with the assessment made it feel as if the air was slowly leaking from her lungs.

And that's it right there—perhaps the most affecting aspect of this winding novel—the honest way that it portrays the realities of the lives of the many different women that walk its pages. Like air slowly leaking from their lungs. I was fascinated by (and sympathetic to) each one. Charlotte herself is so quiet. Brisk and concise when she is rattling off a litany of her deductions, yes. But quiet. And quietly perplexed by the injustices and inanities perpetrated by and inherent in the people around her. I loved her for that perplexity, for her fierce loyalty to her sisters, for her continual expectations of fairness and opportunity, and for her adamant refusal to leave a certain distant someone well enough alone. We are treated to a few precious, and yes, quiet, exchanges between Charlotte and her old friend. They are enigmatic in the extreme and endlessly complicated, even if we only have the merest sliver of the whole picture at this point in time.

She had very much looked forward to a word in private with him. But she forgot, as she usually did, the silence that always came between them in these latter years, whenever they found themselves alone.

The queer sensation in her chest, however, was all too familiar, that mix of pleasure and pain, never one without the other.

She could have done without those feelings. She would have happily gone her entire life never experiencing the pangs of longing and the futility of regret. He made her human—or as human as she was capable of being. And being human was possibly her least favorite aspect of life.

These two. I have to hold myself back from despairing of them. For how little page time they're actually together, I love them rather a lot. And I don't even really know him. But I hold out hope for more ever-so-gradual unraveling in the coming tales. In the end, this is the most unusual of beginnings—an introduction that requires every ounce of focus its readers have to give, even as it grudgingly reveals a paltry few of its own secrets. My kind of mystery.