Review: Storm Front

Title: Storm Front

Series: The Dresden Files #1

Author: Jim Butcher

Genre: Detective Noir/Urban Fantasy

Trigger Warnings: Sexual talk/discussion/innuendos (a lot), sexual content, sexism, gore (severe), death, blood, murder, body horror, domestic abuse (mentions), violence, drug use (mentions)

Back Cover:

Dresden is the best at what he does. Well, technically, he’s the only at what he does. So when the Chicago P.D. has a case that transcends mortal creativity or capability, they come to him for answers. For the “everyday” world is actually full of strange and magical things—and most don’t play well with humans. That’s where Harry comes in. Takes a wizard to catch a—well, whatever. There’s just one problem. Business, to put it mildly, stinks.

So when the police bring him in to consult on a grisly double murder committed with black magic, Harry’s seeing dollar signs. But where there’s black magic, there’s a black mage behind it. And now that mage knows Harry’s name. And that’s when things start to get interesting.

Magic – it can get a guy killed.

Review:

Detective noir is not my genre. My awareness of the tropes and the general ideas and structure comes from media making fun of the genre rather than anything from the genre itself, and the only thing I’ve previously read that’s even close is This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us, which I don’t think really counts. I picked this up because my husband thought I’d like it, and I finished it because it was just interesting enough to be better than the hassle of trying to download a new book on crappy work wifi.

Dresden himself is an unapologetic sexist, though he calls it “a commitment to old-fashioned values.” The book itself doesn’t treat women any better, either. The female characters in this book are murdered for being sexy, using sex for evil, using sex appeal to manipulate people, abused for not being sexy enough, or not sexy but could be with a little effort. Every description of a woman focuses on her curves, how feminine her lips are, the shape of her breasts, and either how sexy she is or how sexy she could be if she tried. An encounter with a vampire left the impression that the most horrifying thing was that her nice human boobs were rotted and saggy in her vampire form. Even Detective Karrin Murphy, a Chicago police officer who Dresden works with a lot and who he claims to have some kind of friendship with, is mainly described by commenting on her feminine shape and how she could be sexy if she wasn’t so focused on being a cop.

Which leads us perfectly into how absolutely obsessed this book was with sex. The murder victims are murdered over sex. The antagonist is obsessed with sex. Dresden’s magical assistant is obsessed with sex. The plot hinges on who is having sex with who and where. If you had no contact with humans besides this book, you would be forgiven for assuming that the only thing humans ever think about is sex. My biggest problem with books targeted for adults is that it seems like the authors are afraid that if they don’t put in enough sex, the book will get categorized as Worthless Children’s Literature. Storm Front cranked that up to eleven – I don’t think there’s a single page that doesn’t have either “I’m a hard-bitten exhausted detective man,” gristly gory death, or sex. Often more than one.

All that said, the book was not entirely awful. I was curious enough about the connection between Dresden’s two cases (the double-murder and a missing husband case – I’m genre-savvy enough to know they had to be connected somehow) that I did want to find out how the mystery ended. And the urban fantasy elements kept me from being entirely bored with the detective bits. But detective noir is still not my genre, and I’m not sex-obsessed enough to be interested in reading more. I didn’t completely hate this book, but I’m not reading any more of this series.

The Dresden Files series:

1. Storm Front
2. Fool Moon
3. Grave Peril
4. Summer Knight
5. Death Masks
6. Blood Rites
7. Dead Beat
8. Proven Guilty
9. White Night
10. Small Favor
11. Turn Coat
12. Changes
13. Ghost Story
14. Cold Days
15. Skin Game
16. Peace Talks
17. Battle Ground
18. Twelve Months
19. Mirror Mirror

Review: The Word is Murder (DNF)

Title: The Word is Murder

Series: Hawthorne and Horowitz #1

Author: Anthony Horowitz

Genre: Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Murder, death, blood, death of parent (mentions), homophobia, child death

Note: Trigger warnings in DNF books only cover the part I read. There may be triggers further in the book that I did not encounter.

Read To: 25%

Back Cover:

One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor – enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service.

Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home.

Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz.

Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne is brusque, temperamental and annoying but even so his latest case with its many twists and turns proves irresistible. The writer and the detective form an unusual partnership. At the same time, it soon becomes clear that Hawthorne is hiding some dark secrets of his own.

A masterful and tricky mystery that springs many surprises, The Word is Murder is Anthony Horowitz at his very best.

Review:

I am not much of a mystery person. I picked this up on concept alone – that the author is taking self-insert to the extreme and putting himself, as himself, into the novel as the Watson-esque sidekick to a modern-day Holmes.

The concept did bring a unique meta aspect into the story. Since at least one of the characters was verifiably real, it gave an almost-nonfiction feel to this fictional novel and I did enjoy that. However, that’s the only good thing I can say about this book.

I’ll start with my minor quibble: Horowitz’s motivation to start writing for Hawthorne is weak. He initially refused to do it when Hawthorne asked. Then he went to a book fair, where a woman asked him why he only wrote fantasy instead of things that were real and true, which are objectively better to read about. His response was that he preferred it, which is perfectly valid. Leaving aside my blinding rage about nonfiction being presented as always and forever 100% more valuable than fiction and it’s not worth reading fiction if one could read nonfiction instead, this exchange makes Horowitz decide that he should write something “real” for once and change his mind about writing for Hawthorne. He didn’t need the money and he didn’t even particularly like Hawthorne, but I guess that exchange made him realize that nonfiction is inherently better than fiction and he should try writing something true for a change.

But I kept going because I was a bit intrigued by the mystery. And honestly, I really like Sherlock Holmes and I know Anthony Horowitz is a good writer (I loved his Alex Rider books as a kid), and I kept hoping it would get better.

Hawthorne is very much like Holmes in many ways. He does have Holmes’ seemingly-magical deductive ability, but in the first 25% of the book you get to see it in action several times but only once with the explanations that make Sherlock Holmes books fun. Hawthorne also captures all of the asshole parts of the original Sherlock but without any of the charm. Perhaps it’s because Horowitz doesn’t live with Hawthorne and therefore didn’t get to see the humanizing moments like Watson did with Holmes, but Hawthorne is an incredibly unlikeable person. I gave up when he went on a homophobic rant – which was challenged by Horowitz, to be fair, but it was still a moment that made me realize that this guy, who I wanted very much to be a modern Sherlock Holmes, was in no way shape or form tolerable to read about.

Also, the original Sherlock seemed to like Watson at least some, or at least recognize that he could be useful. Hawthorne seems to have nothing but hatred and contempt for Horowitz, and if I had been Anthony I would have ducked out the first time I got yelled at for doing the thing he asked me to do.

This book ended up being modern Sherlock Holmes but worse. It captures all of the negative aspects of the original Holmes, amplifies many of them, and downplays the best part about Holmes – the amazing deductive reasoning powers. It leans so hard on the Sherlock Holmes parallels, even in the book itself, that I can’t separate it out to judge the story on its own merits. But Hawthorne himself is terrible and unlikeable, so I can’t imagine I would have enjoyed it much regardless.

The Hawthorne and Horowitz series:

1. The Word is Murder
2. The Sentence is Death
3. A Line to Kill

Review: A Master of Djinn (DNF)

Title: A Master of Djinn

Series: Dead Djinn Universe #1

Author: P. Djèlí Clark

Genre: Alternate History/Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Racism, misogyny, racial slurs, police brutality, violence, blood, body horror, stalking (minor)
Note: In DNF books, warnings listed only include the amount of book I read. There may be other triggers further on that I did not encounter.

Read To: 50%

Back Cover:

Cairo, 1912: Though Fatma el-Sha’arawi is the youngest woman working for the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, she’s certainly not a rookie, especially after preventing the destruction of the universe last summer.

So when someone murders a secret brotherhood dedicated to one of the most famous men in history, al-Jahiz, Agent Fatma is called onto the case. Al-Jahiz transformed the world forty years ago when he opened up the veil between the magical and mundane realms, before vanishing into the unknown. This murderer claims to be al-Jahiz, returned to condemn the modern age for its social oppressions. His dangerous magical abilities instigate unrest in the streets of Cairo that threaten to spill over onto the global stage.

Alongside her Ministry colleagues and a familiar person from her past, Agent Fatma must unravel the mystery behind this imposter to restore peace to the city—or face the possibility he could be exactly who he seems…

Review:

I was really excited for this read. I read the two prequel short stories for this series (A Dead Djinn in Cairo and The Haunting of Tram Car 015) and enjoyed them immensely, and I hoped this book would be more of the same, but longer.

Turns out longer is not really what I wanted. This book just didn’t grab me like I’d hoped.

For starters, the main plot is the mystery, but the secondary plot is Fatma being assigned a partner and the whole “detective who works alone has to learn to work with their partner” trope. I’m not a huge fan of that trope anyway, and it brought out a mean and haughty streak in Fatma that I didn’t particularly like.

I also wasn’t enthused with the main plot as a whole. Fatma and her partner do some investigating into the person pretending to be al-Jahiz who murdered the brotherhood, and halfway through the book, they have discovered that someone is pretending to be al-Jahiz and did in fact murder the brotherhood. It felt like they’d made no progress and answered none of the questions they were trying to answer, and it felt like Fatma’s priorities were more “get my partner reassigned so I can work alone again” and “hang out with my girlfriend” than “solve the mystery.”

To be fair, I don’t read a lot of mysteries (a grand total of 5 in the nine years I’ve been blogging, and 3 of them were this year). I don’t know how they’re supposed to go. All of these complaints could just be my inexperience with mysteries and the fact that they’re not usually my favorite genre. If you’re a fan of mysteries and detective fiction, you might enjoy this a lot more than I did. It’s just not the book for me.

The Dead Djinn Universe:

Novellas:

1. A Dead Djinn in Cairo
2. The Haunting of Tram Car 015

Novels:

1. A Master of Djinn

Review: Murder on the Orient Express

Title: Murder on the Orient Express

Series: Hercule Poirot #10

Author: Agatha Christie

Genre: Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Death, murder, blood (mentions), murder of children, sexism, suicide (mentions)

Back Cover:

Just after midnight, a snowdrift stops the Orient Express in its tracks. The luxurious train is surprisingly full for the time of the year, but by the morning it is one passenger fewer. An American tycoon lies dead in his compartment, stabbed a dozen times, his door locked from the inside.

Isolated and with a killer in their midst, detective Hercule Poirot must identify the murderer – in case he or she decides to strike again.

Review:

My husband was SO EXCITED that I didn’t already know the twist to this murder mystery, because apparently knowing the twist makes it not very enjoyable. This is his favorite Agatha Christie book, and he really really wanted me to expierience it too.

And it was quite an enjoyable read. I did not guess the solution to the mystery at all, which is always a positive thing in my book, and Agatha Christie is indeed fantastic at unexpected twists. The answer of who was the murderer did seem to come out of nowhere, but I did listen to this as an audiobook at work. If I’d been reading this and putting my whole attention into it, I might have been able to follow Hercule Poirot’s thought process a little better.

I can’t help but compare this to And Then There Were None, the other book I’ve read by the same author. Both were short books that can be read quickly, relatively uncomplicated aside from one massive twist revealing who’s responsible, managed a large cast of characters who all managed to be distinct, and featured said characters isolated away from anyone who could help or put confounding variables into the murderers’ carefully crafted plot. The tension is much lower in Murder on the Orient Express since it doesn’t seem likely that the killer intends to kill anyone else, and obviously the twist is different, but otherwise the two books are strikingly similar.

Personally, I think Murder on the Orient Express would be good for at least two reads if one was so inclined. The first to experience the twist and how wrong your guess about the murderer’s identity was (unless you already know the twist, I promise you’re wrong), the second to know the twist and see how all the clues are designed to lead everyone astray but do point to the right answer after all. Beyond that, I don’t know. Agatha Christie’s mysteries do not seem to be designed for re-readability (although I haven’t read many mysteries, so that may be typical of the genre). Regardless, I highly enjoyed this adventure, and Agatha Christie is an absolute master at twists.

Review: Changeless

I do wish they would put a fat model on the cover, because it’s stressed that Alexia is in no way thin.

Title: Changeless

Series: Parisol Protectorate #2

Author: Gail Carriger

Genre: Paranormal/Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Death, blood (extreme), ghosts, body horror, sexual content, racism, fatphobia, body shaming, vomit (mention)

Spoiler Warning: This book is second in a series, and reading past this point will expose you to spoilers of book one, Soulless. Proceed at your own risk.

Back Cover:

Alexia Maccon, the Lady Woolsey, awakens in the wee hours of the mid-afternoon to find her husband, who should be decently asleep like any normal werewolf, yelling at the top of his lungs. Then he disappears; leaving her to deal with a regiment of supernatural soldiers encamped on her doorstep, a plethora of exorcised ghosts, and an angry Queen Victoria.

But Alexia is armed with her trusty parasol, the latest fashions, and an arsenal of biting civility. So even when her investigations take her to Scotland, the backwater of ugly waistcoats, she is prepared: upending werewolf pack dynamics as only the soulless can. She might even find time to track down her wayward husband, if she feels like it.

Review:

In case you misunderstood the back cover as badly as me, Lord Maccon does not poof into vanishment – he just leaves abruptly, busy dealing with a lot of important nonsense and feeling far too busy to tell his dear wife about it. Alexia is not, in fact, hunting a magically vanished husband in this book. She’s hunting the answer to a completely different mystery, and discovering her husband in Scotland is not her main purpose for going there.

Since Alexia and Lord Maccon are already married, this book relies more on the paranormal and mystery aspects than the romance (although there are plenty of sexual moments included). Personally, I enjoyed that quite a lot. This book has the rest of the London werewolf pack returning from war with a brief but delightful moment of don’t-you-know-who-I-am, traveling to Scotland to meet the werewolf pack there and finding out why Lord Maccon left them twenty years ago, some new fun steampunkesque technology, and a lot more information about how werewolves, ghosts, and preternaturals work.

The characters were just as delightful as in Soulless. Alexia was her same adventurous tact-be-damned self, her friend Ivy still had her dramatics and horrible hats, Lord Maccon was still … well, Lord Maccon, gruff werewolf and unintentional fashion disaster. There was also the introduction of Madame Lefoux, a French inventor, and Alexia’s maid Angelique, who received only a brief mention in book one. There is also Sidheag the Alpha female of the Scotland pack, who I’m 99% sure is Sidheag from the Finishing School books.

I very much enjoyed the mystery and learning more about the supernatural elements of this world. But I’m not sure I’m going to read book three. Mainly because of the ending. The mystery is solved, the person(s) responsible are dealt with, and then in the last few pages there is yet another twist that leaves Alexia in a distinctly not-very-good position. I am absolutely sure it gets better before the end of book three, because Alexia is not the kind of person who lets things like this keep her down, but I actually find myself fond of Alexia and don’t want to read about her in a terrible situation with few allies. I may come back to it eventually, because at least books four and five seem to have positive things happen and I do want to see more of Alexia, but right now I care about her too much to want to jump right into reading about bad things happening to her.

The Parisol Protectorate series:

1. Soulless
2. Changeless
3. Blameless
4. Heartless
5. Timeless

Review: And Then There Were None

Title: And Then There Were None

Author: Agatha Christie

Genre: Mystery

Trigger Warnings: Death, death of children (mentions), murder, guns, gun violence, suicide, antisemitism (minor)

Back Cover:

First, there were ten—a curious assortment of strangers summoned as weekend guests to a private island off the coast of Devon. Their host, an eccentric millionaire unknown to all of them, is nowhere to be found. All that the guests have in common is a wicked past they’re unwilling to reveal—and a secret that will seal their fate. For each has been marked for murder. One by one they fall prey. Before the weekend is out, there will be none. And only the dead are above suspicion.

Review:

Despite going through a phase in high school where I mainly read classics, this is the first Agatha Christie book I’ve read. My husband highly recommended Murder on the Orient Express, but that one had a waiting list at the library. And Then There Were None, however, was available. I discovered after finishing it that this is the world’s best-selling mystery and sixth-best-selling book of all time (per Wikipedia). I am absolutely not surprised.

The story starts with eight different characters separately approaching Soldier Island. All have received requests or invitations on varying pretexts to visit the island on August 8, and so they are doing so. Upon arrival, the butler announces that their mysterious hosts have been held up but he has received instructions to go on as usual in the meantime. So the butler and his wife serve the eight guests dinner. After dinner, an unknown voice accuses all ten people – the butler and his wife as well as the eight guests – of murder. And then one of them is dead.

Isolated on tiny Soldier Island, plagued by a killer picking them off one by one, and haunted by a nursery rhyme about “Ten Little Soldier Boys” that the murderer seems to be using as a prescription for each death, the characters slowly begin to crack under the stress of repeated deaths. Whoever is doing this doesn’t intend to let anyone leave the island alive. And with the lack of places to hide on the small, rocky bit of land, the only logical conclusion is that one of their number is the killer.

The plot was fairly straightforward – the nursery rhyme is repeated multiple times, and each death follows the rhyme in sequence as the ten characters die one by one – but the real interest came in the question of which of the ten is the murderer. You would have to be a lot more observant and better at guessing plots than me to figure out who it is, and it took me completely by surprise. I can’t even say anything about the characters without giving too much away, and the less you know about this one going in, the better (don’t read any of the plot or character information from the Wikipedia article I linked).

Agatha Christie is known for her twist endings, and this was absolutely a twist. It’s a quick read (the audiobook is only six hours), a great workout for your plot-puzzling muscles (I promise you won’t guess the answers to the mystery), and highly entertaining. I absolutely recommend it.

Review: This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us

Title: This Body’s Not Big Enough For Both Of Us

Author: Edgar Cantero

Genre: Mostly Detective Noir, a tiny bit Thriller, a little Dark Comedy

Trigger Warnings: Transphobic terminology (mention), blood, death, guns, self-injury, pedophilia (mentions), intravenous drug use, car crashes

Back Cover:

In a dingy office in Fisherman’s Wharf, the glass panel in the door bears the names of A. Kimrean and Z. Kimrean. Private Eyes. Behind the door there is only one desk, one chair, one scrawny androgynous P.I. in a tank top and skimpy waistcoat. A.Z., as they are collectively known, are twin brother and sister. He’s pure misanthropic logic, she’s wild hedonistic creativity. A.Z. have been locked in mortal battle since they were in utero … which is tricky because they, very literally, share one single body. That’s right. One body, two pilots. The mystery and absurdity of how Kimrean functions, and how they subvert every plotline, twist, explosion, and gunshot–and confuse every cop, neckless thug, cartel boss, ninja, and femme fatale–in the book is pure Cantero magic.

Someone is murdering the sons of the ruthless drug cartel boss known as the Lyon in the biggest baddest town in California–San Carnal. The notorious A.Z. Kimrean must go to the sin-soaked, palm-tree-lined streets of San Carnal, infiltrate the Lyon’s inner circle, and find out who is targeting his heirs, and while they are at it, rescue an undercover cop in too deep, deal with a plucky young stowaway, and stop a major gang war from engulfing California. They’ll face every plot device and break every rule Elmore Leonard wrote before they can crack the case, if they don’t kill each other (themselves) first.

This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us is a mind-blowing, gender-bending, genre-smashing romp through the entire pantheon of action and noir. It is also a bold, tautly crafted novel about family, being weird, and claiming your place in your own crazy story, that can only come from the mind of Edgar Cantero.

Review:

Despite how dark and downright horrifying this book can be at times, This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us was, overall, astonishingly fun.

Adrian and Zooey are conjoined twins. Except instead of having two torsos, or two heads coming out of one torso, or an abnormal number of limbs, or something like that, they share a body with two arms, two legs, and one head – perfectly normal to look at. They’re two separate people sharing one body and one brain – Adrian has the left half, Zooey has the right. Adrian is pure calculation and logic, and Zooey is pure emotion and hedonism. And they hate each other.

But together, they make a really good private eye. So when the police department calls them in to help an undercover cop prevent a gang war, they get in a little bit over their heads, especially since Adrian is actually trying to get things done and Zooey gets them in trouble by acting on impulses and feelings and never thinking things through. Zooey worked really well as as foil for Adrian, but I really liked him the best. Neither of them were exactly good people, but I related much more to Adrian’s logic than Zooey’s free-spiritedness.

This book does get really dark. There’s car crashes, guns, gory murders and injuries, questions of what exactly a minor child should do when she knows her father’s a mobster and how to cope when the polar opposite sibling you hate shares your body, the trauma of growing up abandoned and medicalized because people think you’re insane and having people see you as a medical curiosity or a dangerous maniac but never as a human being, Adrian’s trauma of being asexual while Zooey is a nymphomaniac, and the question of whether the siblings trying to hurt each other counts as siblings fighting or self-harm. But despite all that, the writing style and Zooey’s inability to be anything approaching serious, it manages to be mostly lighthearted and sometimes even laugh-out-loud funny.

This book breaks the fourth wall a lot. In some ways it doesn’t seem intentional, since Zooey is a little nuts anyway and seems to fully believe that she’s the protagonist in a book. So like, sort-of fourth wall breaks. It fully leans into the wacky weirdness of two siblings who hate each other in one body, and was highly entertaining. It wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Review: The Smiley Killer

Title: The Smiley Killer

Author: Julia Derek

Genre: Thriller/Mystery

Back Cover:

Seventeen-year-old Riley has been fascinated with crime investigation since she discovered CSI on TV. So, when it’s announced a serial killer is loose in the city, hell-bent on killing girls like Riley’s little sister, Riley’s on full alert. Not even Mark, the super hot college boy pursuing her, can get her mind off the case.

A victim found near the research lab where Riley’s friend Alyssa volunteers makes Riley think she’s found a lead: The killer’s signature—sad smileys—appears in the lab, so it seems the killer could be someone working there. Riley alerts Alyssa and the two notify the NYPD. But the police dismiss their claims.

Convinced she’s onto something, Riley embarks on her own investigation together with Alyssa. When another victim is found near the lab, it seems they’re close to finding the killer. Problem is, their prime suspect is a scientist’s younger brother—who happens to be Mark…

Review:

Though you wouldn’t know it from the genre counts in the sidebar, I love YA thrillers. I just have a hard time finding good ones. So when The Smiley Killer showed up in my inbox, I trusted my reader’s instinct that said this one is good and said yes.

Riley was interesting. She was a little like a bulldog – small-ish, but fierce and stubborn. It’s established early on that she’s a black belt in karate, and I expected that to play a bigger part than it did. (And as a fellow martial artist, I wanted more karate butt-kicking). She was actually pretty normal.

I don’t want to mention any other characters for fear of revealing who the killer is. The culprit is the last person you’d expect, unless you’re like me, in which case your suspicions will bounce between a likely suspect and the real culprit.

I do feel a need to mention, though, that I would have liked the romance between Riley and Mark better if Mark wasn’t so perfect.

I haven’t read a lot of murder mysteries/hunting serial killers books, so I don’t have much to compare The Smiley Killer to. But it was excellently done. All the important little details were woven seamlessly into the story without actually looking important.

At some points there were details that I thought could have been removed, but then I got to the end and they were actually essential. Someone who was meticulously analyzing every detail could figure out the killer, but a reader who’s just devouring a good story would be taken by surprise – which is the way a good mystery should be.

The Smiley Killer was an awesome serial killer mystery/thriller. And just when I thought everything was wrapped up neatly, a twist is thrown into the works, the book ends, and now I want book two. But Unnatural Born Killers isn’t out yet …

Update: According to Julia Derek’s website, The Smiley Killer is a standalone companion to her Girl Undercover series. There is no book two.

I received a free review copy of The Smiley Killer from the author. Her generosity in no way influenced, or sought to influence, this review.

Review: Jewel of the Thames

Title: Jewel of the Thames

Series: A Portia Adams Adventure #1

Author: Angela Misri

Genre: Historical/Mystery

Back Cover:

There’s a new detective at 221 Baker Street.

Nineteen-year-old Portia Adams has always been inquisitive. There’s nothing she likes better than working her way through a mystery. When her mother dies, Portia is left in the guardianship of the extravagant Mrs. Jones. Portia is promptly whisked from Toronto to London by her guardian, where she discovers that she has inherited 221 Baker Street — the former offices of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Portia settles into her new home and gets to know her downstairs tenants, including the handsome and charming Brian Dawes. She also finds herself entangled in three cases: the first one involving stolen jewelry, the second one a sick judge and the final case revolving around a kidnapped child. But the greatest mystery of all is her own. How did she come to inherit this townhouse? And why did her mother keep her heritage from her? Portia has a feeling Mrs. Jones knows more than she is letting on. In fact, she thinks her new guardian may be the biggest clue of all.

Review:

I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan (Arthur Conan Doyle’s books, the movies with Robert Downey Jr., the BBC TV show …). So when an email appeared in my inbox saying “There’s a new detective at 221B Baker Street,” I decided to say yes before I even read anything about the book.

Portia was completely enjoyable. She was a bookish introvert like me, but with awesome deductive skills. She wasn’t quite as good at deductions (or disguises) as Sherlock, but she’s young. I’m sure she’ll get there.

There were also some good minor characters, like Portia’s guardian, Mrs. Jones, who has a lot of interesting secrets. And Constable Brian Dawes, whose parents live below Portia (and who I’m thinking may eventually play Watson to Portia’s Holmes).

The mysteries were very much like something I’d imagine Doyle would write – a little less complicated, perhaps, but still great. They were engrossing and fun, and just like Doyle’s plots, I had a hard time guessing the culprit. Angela Misri certainly did her research, and just like a good Sherlock Holmes mystery, I feel like I learned something while being entertained.

In my opinion, the writing was what really made the book. It read like an old classic book – in a good way. It perfectly fit the subject and tone and added the finishing touches to a very Sherlock-esque story.

The Jewel of the Thames was a fun mystery that definately felt like a Sherlock Homes adventure. It was a good start to a series, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Portia’s skills develop in further books.

I received a free review copy of The Jewel of the Thames from the publisher. Their generosity in no way influenced, or sought to influence, this review.

The Portia Adams Adventures series:

1. The Jewel of the Thames
2. Thrice Burned
3. No Matter How Improbable