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My Dearest Holmes by Rohase Piercy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


For me the shocking thing here isn't that someone published a queer look at Watson and Sherlock but that they did it in the 1980s. Even into the mid-late 1990s when I started publishing short stories most publishers had bans on gay characters, often blacklisting authors so that's the shocker, not that someone imagined them as queer. That, I suspect happens often. I don't. I see Holmes as Aro/Ace instead but regardless I went into this after someone gave me the book.

One of the stars was for the year published and the way Piercy wrote it, making it feel tonally as if it were a Sherlockian tale. On the other hand, I found it rather dull. It's not a mystery with queer pining. It's unrequited queer pining and suffering with something of a mystery in it. You're in for a 140 pages of Watson mentally moaning about how he can't have Sherlock. (which made it really a 2 star read in most places specially the first story)

We have two novelettes. The first is the weaker of the two. They are written as if they were Watson detailing a case like usual but these were to be published after their deaths when they could no longer hurt them.

Watson has been asked to get Holmes to look into some missing letters for a friend, letters of a compromising nature. At this time period, being homosexual isn't just going to ruin your reputation, it's a ticket to jail (especially for men, women were a little better protected). This of course is the segue into Watson's pining for Holmes.

I honestly can't even remember what the letters were about or the names of the people, I was that bored with it. If not using this for a reading challenge, I would have DNFed it there. It ends with Holmes giving Watson good advice for the time: concentrate on your job, learn to be more discreet (we learn that Watson was given to going to Molly clubs) and marry to throw off suspicion (which in this time period was the safest thing to do if you were gay, just ask Oscar Wilde)

The second was a bit more interesting as it revolves around "The Final Problem" the infamous death of Sherlock at Reichenbach Falls. In this Watson has married Mary which is a marriage that acts as a shield for them both, she being a lesbian. (again not an unusual solution at that time). So we get that story through Watson's unrequited love lens. Somehow everyone seems able to take one look at Watson and knows he's gay...

We also get Watson's reaction to Holmes's death (needless to say he takes it beyond bad) and to his return to life. And after all the queer suffering (Watson even thinks at a young gay couple, enjoy it now before you suffer like I suffer) it ends on a positive note.

My main quibble with this story is Mycroft who Piercy chose to depict as a despicable brother and cruel (potentially homophobic) man and might even be Moriarty himself. Not sure where she pulled that out of the ether but it didn't jive with my understanding of Mycroft at all and it was jarring.

At the end of the day, I won't remember this book by the time April rolls around.





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A Lack of Temperance by Anna Loan-Wilsey

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I wanted to like this one a little more than I did. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed it but I had certain reservations in how Hattie was developed. For instance, she collects plants and presses them (almost 2 thousand of them) but we don't know why she's interested. She only seems to do this when it's needed for her to appear dirty or weird to the other women, doing things women shouldn't do in the late 1800s). She never talks about it, not even with the doctor who is romantically interested in her so it's just a weird McGuffin. There are other things teased about her, like a mistrust of doctors, that never really gel.

What I did like about Hattie is her job. She's a traveling secretary which means she can be anywhere (and I peeked at the series and that's exactly what she does). The job that takes her to Hot Springs AK is to be a secretary to the president of woman's temperance movement. Hattie is befriended by a pair of aged sisters who think she's sympathetic to the cause (Hattie seemed more horrified by the Carrie Nation-esque hatchet smashing of saloons).

Her would-be employer had her share of enemies as do her potential next in charge ladies,not to mention the obvious suspect, the saloon owner who got his place busted up.

I liked the mystery well enough but this skirted on my yeah-no rule of having a detective who doesn't like the amateur sleuth and wants her gone. It wasn't that big of a deal here but it did make me roll my eyes. At least it didn't go the route of having Hattie blamed and needing to clear herself. That trope is so old and over done it makes me want to skip book one of most amateur sleuth series.

I would read another of these but I hope Hattie gets more fleshed out as she goes. She needed more meat on her bones.



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When Blood Lies by C.S. Harris

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This time Sebastian and Hero are in France trying to track down his runaway mother who he finds dying after being flung off a bridge. The local police (of which France has more than one branch of) has no interest in the case, claiming that it’s a suicide. Sebastian of course is going to solve this himself and he hooks up with Vidocq who is a real person and an absolutely fascinating criminal turned crime solver who added so much to early police work.

Sophie, his mother, has been living in Paris with her long-time lover Maréchal Alexandre McClellan who fought with Napoleon but has now sworn allegiance to the newly restored Bourbon royals. The Bourbons are more interested in destroying all of Napoleon’s public works that were much needed and losing much favor of the French people who might just be hoping for the return of Napoleon. Naturally, Sophie is somehow wrapped up in Napoleon’s escape from Elba and his attempted coup.

And this bothered me. Lately Harris has been doing the same thing I stopped reading Anne Perry for: trying to hook everything into the politics of the time. I don’t care about that. I just want to read a good mystery. It doesn’t have to be tied heavily into the politics of the time though I can understand the temptation because that’s where historical research goes.

The part of the formula I’m really disliking is the family melodrama. I always hated it back when it was Sebastian and Kat. Now we have his ugly sister Amanda and I’m just waiting for this grandchild to be a boy and her try to grab Sebastian’s title for him (probably after Hendon passes on so not to humiliate him) And then we have what happened to Hero’s mother and what if her father’s newest baby is a boy? I hope it doesn’t go here but I can see it.

I was disappointed that Sebastian didn’t meet up with McClellan so that bit of family drama is still out there waiting to happen or not, given the political environment between their countries. I did like the mystery but if you stripped out the endless political stuff this would have been a very short story. I still liked it. It was well drafted but it might have got that fourth star out of pure nostalgia for the earlier days of this series before everything was hooked into the politics.






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Murder in Old Bombay by Nev March

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This came close to a five star for me but it tried to do a wee bit too much and that's understandable in some ways for a first novel. There's no guarantee that there'll be a book two so the romantic subplot was forced to completion instead of leaving a little for next time (though in how this was concluded it's easy to see that wouldn't have worked.)

I will say it did what a good book should: got me researching things. I know very little about the Parsee and Zoroastrianism and that was core to this. There is also a bit of brutal Indian/Colonialism history that I don't want to say much about as it ties into the plot.

Jim Agnihotri has mustered out of the army and is recovering in an army hospital, bored when he comes across a news article about two women, Bacha and Pilloo who have fallen from a clock tower. A criminal case failed so it was written up as a suicide which their family, especially the young man, Adi, husband to the former and brother to the latter, rejects. His letter to the editor struck a nerve with Jim who decides he wants to emulate his literary hero Sherlock Holmes (who would have been written almost contemporary with this time period) and offers his services to Adi.

Jim finds himself stirring one hornet's nest after the other in his pursuit of what happened to these two women who most assuredly did not commit suicide. Into this mix is the strong willed younger sister of Adi, Diana, who wants to be his Watson but is constrained by the time period's mores for women. Add into this the complex culture to be found in India. It's not all one thing. There is Zoroastrianism, Hinduism and Muslim (not to mention the Christians). THere are differing caste systems and even talking to a man too familiarly could cause an entire family to lose caste. Then you have the Rajas and the Brits and all the various warring factions.

Jim has to sort through it all with further complications of him being biracial and illegitimate. He couldn't have rose further in the army but he's apparently light skinned enough to pass as British. He and Adi become close like brothers but it is Diana who is the issue. Falling in love won't work because he is not Parsee and apparently they didn't convert others then (I see that they do now). If they marry the whole family would be ostracized.

And the thing that bugged me about the mystery is that it does go on a wee bit too long and the romance same deal. That said I really liked Jim and Diana not to mention Adi. There is some level of violence in this including human trafficking so heed that as a trigger warning. I am looking forward to book two.



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The Mystery of Albert E. Finch by Callie Hutton

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I bought this one without doing my due diligence (though it's 4 starred here so that might not have helped) because it was set in Bath England, a vastly interesting place. Outside of two mentions of Sally Lunn's this could have been set anywhere, that's how badly the setting was used. Sigh. It didn't even do a particularly good job at setting the time period, other than a few mentions of carriages and a scattering of t'is and t'was thrown in for...yeah I'm not even sure. There are so many better historicals out there.

To be fair, I didn't read the first two (nor do I plan t0) and I had high hopes since the author has many titles (beginning to think it was because she shotguns them out there). I even gave it some credit because it's a personal preference to not have moron cops and the two in this are super stupid (to the point even their boss tells them they're dumb and try again).

Amy and William have married only to have the husband of her cousin, Alice to be accused of killing Alice right at their wedding dinner table. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum detectives tell the newlyweds they can't leave Bath nor can they get involved in the case. They ignore the latter and spend at least 200 pages whining about missing their Brighton Beach honeymoon to the point I was ready to throw this thing into a woodchipper if I had to hear about it one more time.

So if they want to go be newly weds, they have to solve Alice's murder and yet somehow don't put an obvious suspect on their list for literally ages. There aren't that many suspects so I figured out what happened the moment it was mentioned Albert doesn't like champagne and gave it to his wife. Annabel her twin however is sure he killed Alice and doesn't want Amy to investigate (and thanks for giving 4 characters A names).

Amy and William are very one note characters. Amy spends a lot of time getting angry over the littlest of things. Now I came in with book three so never really saw her write anything let alone a mystery and the book club scenes were pointless (unless you want to give them more reasons to complain about the honeymoon. No lie Amy is more upset about this than she ever seems about her cousin's death. Oh well Alice is dead but damn it I can't go on my honeymoon).

Her family is forced to live with her and William for a short time because of a leak in the plumbing of her father and brother's new place in Bath. Why? To prove her father is a jerk? To set up her brother's arc? None of it added to the story. Eloise is supposed to be Amy's best friend. She's barely in this so her little arc at the end has no impact. Heck even the parrot Othello's sex changes from time to time (along with other things that should have been caught in editing).

This was a definite miss for me. Sad because I would have loved a series set in Bath but it's definitely not going to be this one.



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