Are you looking for an entertaining mystery series to get you through the dark days of November and December? Look no further than the Lady Sherlock series by Sherry Thomas. It’s engaging, it’s fresh, and it’s feminist. It’ll take you right back to Victorian London, where you can watch a mystery being solved and class and gender barriers being broken, all at the same time!
I’ve read the five books I’ve been able to read thus far, and here are two notes: One, please see my blog post about the first in the series here, and there is a brand-new sixth book that has come out right now, this very week, you can put in a request for it here.
So. What’s going on with Victorian-era detective Charlotte Holmes and all of her cohorts? Well, Charlotte wants to make her living by her wits, so she invents an incapacitated brother, Sherlock Holmes, and advertises his services as a consulting detective, while she acts as his proxy. Charlotte, along with Inspector Treadles of Scotland Yard, and her cohorts Mrs. Watson, Miss Redmayne, and her sister Livia Holmes, solves London murders, a high-profile country house murder, and an art theft which takes the crew to Paris. In true Sherlockian fashion, a criminal mastermind called Moriarty emerges as a powerful antagonist. There is a ton of family drama in these books, as well as the crime, which makes the stories extra riveting.
The fifth book, Murder on Cold Street, is the one where it becomes obvious that Moriarty really is the “Napoleon of crime” that he’s said to be in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Inspector Treadles is arrested as a suspect in a double murder in a deserted London house, and it’s up to Charlotte to find out what really happened.
So, look! Six books in a row! I hope you enjoy the Lady Sherlock series as much as I do.
Here are the Lady Sherlock mysteries, in order, for you to request from Heights Libraries:
Book One: A Study in Scarlet Women
Book Two: A Conspiracy in Belgravia
Book Three: The Hollow of Fear
Book Four: The Art of Theft
Book Five: Murder on Cold Street
Book Six: Miss Moriarty, I Presume?
Will there be book 7? Livia & Stephen surely have to get together, no?