Mrs Sherlock Holmes

Timeless has been sort of weird lately with Wyatt bringing Jessica to the bunker. So, then, she just quits her job to live there with him permanently? Or is she allowed to come and go? Agent Christopher is just letting this security breach happen? Plus, Lucy now is getting close to Flynn. It's a mess.

At least the time travel stuff is still good, now they've figured out how to have four passengers without the weird side effects that Jiya experienced. Pretty deep interaction between Rufus and his mentor Connor during the Delta Blues episode. The next episode coming up features suffragist Alice Paul and Grace Humiston. By sheer coincidence, I have been reading a book about "Mrs. Sherlock Holmes" lately, but I haven't finished it yet.

While the book is interesting, I wouldn't recommend it, because it's told in such a haphazard, illogical way. Brad Ricca's book with the very long title isn't just a straightforward biography or a telling of her famous case about Ruth Cruger. It begins with a puzzling "Caveat Emptor" that purports to warn you about the content of the book, but it's so damn vague and pompously worded that you don't understand what he means; is he talking about the horrors of crime, white slavery hysteria, peonage, poverty, etc? I don't know, because he's so self-indulgent.

Then comes a prologue, an anecdote about Arthur Conan Doyle coming to America in 1914 and meeting a detective--no, not Grace Humiston. It's some other guy, and Doyle unwisely makes anti-suffragist remarks to a reporter; he seems to suggest that the suffragists deserve to be lynched. He walks it back later, trying to say that he supports independent, intelligent women, just not them having the right to vote. But then the anecdote just wanders off, to nowhere in particular, not even mentioning how angry suffragists put a bomb in ACD's mail box in 1911. This prologue has no relation to the subsequent chapters, and I don't understand Ricca's logic in including it, if he wasn't going to make a sharper point about ACD in relation to Grace Humiston.

I was hoping we'd get to Grace Humiston soon, but no, Ricca instead opens the main book with the day that Ruth Cruger went missing. I'd be fine with that, but then he abandons the story to tell us an unrelated case. Then later he picks up the Ruth Cruger storyline, then he goes into other cases, then back to Ruth, etc. The book should have been called "A Series of Unrelated True Crime Stories, told out of order". Why couldn't Ricca at least have gone chronologically? What would have been wrong with telling the story of Grace Humiston like a straightforward biography, telling where she was born, was educated, who her first husband was, and her career? Why the back and forth from year to year, case to case, until I'm thoroughly confused? I don't mind time travel in a TV show of course, but Ricca's popping in and out of time is so disordered and random. My God, he doesn't even stop to note when Grace Quackenbos gets remarried and her name becomes Grace Humiston!! ETA: (Not until page 233, in chapter 16!) Fuck this writer. I guess I'll still try to finish the book, because some of the anecdotes are interesting, but I do hope that Timeless handles this woman better.