The game’s afoot—this time with a feminist, gender-bending twist—in a Sherlock Holmes-inspired mystery that is sure to attract any fan of the Great Detective.
What if there was no Sherlock Holmes—at least, not the pipe-smoking, cocaine-addicted super sleuth whose exploits have beguiled generations of mystery fans. What if, instead, Sherlock was the superb creation of a brainy woman named Charlotte Holmes, who invented the detective to enable her to engage her own skills for crime solving in an era when such pursuits were strictly a man’s game.
Author Sherry Thomas has concocted such a fiction in her Lady Sherlock series, and her latest, A Conspiracy in Belgravia continues the story of Lady Charlotte’s creation—a super-logical detective named Sherlock, who evidently suffers from an illness that keeps him “behind the scenes” while his “sister,” Charlotte (who is assisted by her partner and landlady, Mrs. Watson) acts as his public face.
Her scheme gets complicated when Lady Ingram, the wife of Lord Ingram Ashburton, Charlotte’s close friend and benefactor, requests a confidential meeting with Sherlock Holmes. Charlotte must balance her loyalty to Ashburton against Lady Ingram’s private request for Holmes to locate a former lover named Myron Finch.
As Charlotte searches for the elusive Finch, she weighs a marriage proposal from Ash’s brother, Lord Bancroft. And always lurking in the background is the shadowy arch-villain Moriarty. What is Lady Ingram’s connection to the infamous criminal mastermind, and how will it affect Holmes’ detective work? These and other Sherlockian puzzles are sure to be embraced by contemporary fans of the Great Detective—in whatever guise Sherlock chooses to appear.
