Fourteen-year-old Enola, 'born indecently late in Mother's life, a scandal, a burden, you see,' attempts some detecting on her own when her mother goes missing and her elder brothers Sherlock and Mycroft plan to send her off to boarding school and write their mother off as a lost case. Nevertheless, I would like to read more about Enola Holmes.Since the great fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes seems to have, at the pen of adult author Laurie King, improbably acquired a wife, it's not much of a stretch to find that his family now comprises a younger sister as well. Although I know the book is a series, I was surprised by the unresolved conclusion. She also does a good job showing the Holmes brothers dismissive and chauvinistic attitudes – which is straight from Conan Doyle’s characterization – and the restraints Enola has to work with in as a woman in Victorian society. Springer does a good job avoiding making Enola immediately as intellectually brilliant as her more famous brothers, allowing her to develop these skills over the course of the book. Enola decides instead to run away and investigate her mother’s disappearance on her own, stumbling into another mystery along the way. Her famous brothers arrive and Mycroft decides to send the non-gender conforming Enola to a finishing school. The novel begins on Enola’s 14th birthday when her mother disappears without a trace. Enola Holmes is certainly more interesting than the mystery sister introduced in the BBC’s deeply-flawed final series of Sherlock, who also had an odd name starting with E – Eurus.Įnola is the much younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft who grows up isolated at the family’s estate after the death of her father and her mother estrangement with her brothers. I’ve read all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes writings and numerous non-canonical works by other writers, and this is definitely a good addition to that body of work. The upcoming Enola Holmes movie on Netflix made me aware of the existence of this first book in a series about Sherlock Holme’s sister.

Publication Info: Recorded Books, Inc., 2006

Title: The Case of the Missing Marquess: An Enola Holmes Mystery

The case of missing marquess