Where Charlotte Fences With Moriarty

Miss Moriarty, I Presume? by Sherry Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Another good installment in one of my favorite series. This was a well-written, fun book, and it's recommended along with all the others.

Not quite as awesome as the rest of the series, IMO, so a 4 instead of 5; it got a bit slow in the middle third. But the last third or so is really great again. And I like the ending.

Charlotte Holmes, who the world thinks works for her brother Sherlock (who doesn't exist), has gotten increasingly embroiled with Moriarty, pretty much by accident, in the last few books. He doesn't have her full story and is watching her, but Charlotte knows she's in danger. Now Moriarty himself is tasking her to check on his daughter in a sort of religious retreat quite a ways from London. Whether his daughter is really alive is a mystery; whether he intends to do Charlotte and her friends harm is another mystery; what exactly is going on at the little cultish enclave is another. And all of it gets tied up in one story by the end.

I regret a little that Moriarty features so much in the story now. Brittany Cavallaro's Charlotte Holmes series (where she's a descendant of the real Sherlock, set in the present) is also a lot of fun, and it's fantastic to a point, but it gets weighed down by focusing on Moriarty and the enmity between them. They're so evenly matched that the story almost stops. That series becomes more like spy-versus-spy than a detective story, and I lost interest. There's a similar dynamic in this book. You want to see Charlotte be awesome, solving some mystery, being smarter than everyone else, but it's less fun when she's facing someone just as smart. (I hated this in Iron Man, too; the MC invents a cool iron suit that flies, giving him this interesting advantage over criminals, and the first thing the screenwriters do is give him a bad guy with the same suit, negating everything cool about him. One of the early Superman movies did the same thing.)

It's still a fun book, and there are lots of great surprises; I'd just rather see Charlotte go up against regular people and stump them with her amazing brain. That's more fun for me.

YMMV.

But to sum up--I still liked it and it's still recommended. Lots of fun. I'm ready for the next one.

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