Description: In 1910 Toronto, while other bachelor girls perfect their domestic skills and find husbands, two friends perfect their sleuthing skills and find a murderer.
Inspired by their fascination with all things Sherlock Holmes, best friends and flatmates Merinda and Jem launch a consulting detective business. The deaths of young Irish women lead Merinda and Jem deeper into the mire of the city's underbelly, where the high hopes of those dreaming to make a new life in Canada are met with prejudice and squalor.
While searching for answers, donning disguises, and sneaking around where no proper ladies would ever go, they pair with Jasper Forth, a police constable, and Ray DeLuca, a reporter in whom Jem takes a more than professional interest. Merinda could well be Toronto's premiere consulting detective, and Jem may just find a way to put her bachelor girlhood behind her forever--if they can stay alive long enough to do so.
My Thoughts: Let me start by saying that I love Sherlock (the BBC and movie adaptations, not the actual books. I haven't read those. ), so this description immediately caught my eye. That said, I'm not going to focus my review on how well the story stood up to the Sherlock Holmes stories, only on how it managed to hold up on its own.
When I first received this book in the mail, it was about half as thick as I was expecting it to be. However, McMillan managed to squeeze a lot into those 200 some pages, leaving me with a picture of a city and its inhabitants that was rather complete. Merinda and Jem kept the pace of the story going with their "improper" behavior and Ray's perspective allowed me to see a side of the city that Jem and Merinda were largely removed from.
I didn't like everything about this book. The footnotes, while obviously meant to be informative and amusing, felt more like an intrusion by the author and I stopped reading them about half-way through. Along with this, there were a few times that the scenes seemed to head-hop. This might have been an attempt at omnipresence, yet it didn't come off quite right because most of the book reads as a third person narrative.
I do look forward to the sequel and reading about how Jem and Ray manage to balance their relationship. It will also be amusing to see just what kind of situations McMillan manages to put her heroines in.
I received this book through Litfuse in exchange for an honest review.
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