A Study in Honor

I was looking for a new mystery series and stumbled on a modern update of Holmes and Watson by Claire O'Dell. The book was classified as a cozy mystery, and I thought it would be a treat to get a gender-flipped, race-flipped modern pastiche. But it's not a cozy, not unless you count some cooking scenes, and it's not a mystery either. It's a near-future science fiction thriller about spies, elections, and war trauma. The writing is fine for what it is, but it's a jarring disappointment if you were expecting something completely different.

More than that, although there are nods to book canon in the names of characters like Jacob Bell, this novel reads more like it was influenced by BBC's Sherlock, dropping the name Anderson and casting the Irene Adler equivalent as a traitorous villain profiting off the war. (FUCK YOU, MOFFATT once again for making Irene Adler an amoral, greedy mercenary instead of a wronged woman whom Holmes respected and admired!! And FUCK Elementary too for making the leap to combine Irene with Moriarty as well. Fucking bastards need their sexy, crazy Catwoman, and need to convince everyone this is the correct interpretation of Irene!!)

But I digress. Back to A Study in Honor:



Dr Janet Watson is a war veteran of a new, 2nd Civil War in the US. She's black and queer and she lost an arm in battle. She's got a makeshift prosthetic device for now, but is hoping that the Veterans Administration in DC will give her a replacement so that she can go back to being a surgeon. Until then, she takes a lowly job as a medical technician and tries to find an affordable place to live. Then friend Jacob Bell (instead of Stamford) introduces her to Sara Holmes and thus we get the unbelievably wonderful and excellent flat rented from Hudson Realty. I love Janet Watson a lot, and found much of her PTSD struggles and sympathy for other veterans moving. But unfortunately, I don't like Sara Holmes at all.

Sara Holmes never does any deducing, she's from a wealthy family (I've always preferred Holmes as being from a family who's lost their fortune), and she's a spy. She's not a detective at all, and the weirdest thing is that she wears lace gloves to hide the fact that she's got implants that keep her wired to news and/or internet feeds. So she doesn't need to deduce facts about anyone; she can just fucking look it up and send it straight to her brain. What the hell? And the whole thing about her being a spy--she's not even a freelance secret agent, like she claims she is. She has superiors and a whole bureaucracy that she has to hide from when she decides to do a rogue investigation for Janet's sake. I mean, who the hell is Holmes if she isn't self-employed and in charge of her own cases? In book canon, Holmes did go undercover as Altamont the spy for the sake of the war, but Sara Holmes's espionage is just cloak and dagger shit about conspiracies and assassinations made to look like accidents or natural deaths. It's like BBC Sherlock's idea that the mystery doesn't have to make sense, it just has to look cool and involve a lot of running around.

Also off-putting is that Sara Holmes just casually calls Janet "my love" very soon after they first move in together. What the hell? It's not even framed as some British slang or Cockney dialect, like calling everyone "luv". It's just there, and Janet protests this, but Sara insists that she means it (and then somewhat clarifies that it's not romantic love). So it's friendship or platonic love if the writer means Sara to be asexual--however, they've still only known each other days and weeks when she starts this "my love" business. It would feel more organic to me if Sara started out just calling Janet "Dr Watson" or "my friend" affectionately first, then deepening the endearment after some time passed, or life-threatening crisis was shared, but no, Sara doesn't wait for anything organic. We never even understand how Sara found out about Watson and chose her to be her roomate at 2B. (It's made to look like mere coincidence and good luck, but Janet later learns that Sara deliberately sought her out through Jacob Bell.) But why did she? What did she want? I don't understand a thing about Sara Holmes or her motivations. As far as I'm concerned she's an opaque black box. I don't even get her sense of humor.

So being so unhappy with Sara Holmes, and with the plot in general NOT being in any way a cozy mystery, I was rather dissatisfied with the book. I did read it to the end to find out the result of the investigation, but the clues were so few and hard to follow. The focus was less on solving stuff and more on "how to escape without tipping off our shadowy enemy or Sara's shadowy spy bosses." And of course, Sara kept gifting Janet with luxurious clothes and jewelry and journals like some demented fairy godmother. Like she's wooing her, or condescendingly trying to "help" instead of asking for permission. There is good writing here, and it's well reviewed online. It's just, I would like this book a lot better if Holmes were a detective and any of her behavior made sense, or if she even seemed like a brilliant detective instead of a mediocre spy seeking thrills and stumbling around dark shadows until she got a result.