A Study in Honor (by Claire O'Dell)

This is a gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes homage, read for the category "a political thriller by a marginalized author (BIPOC, or LGBTQIA+)" in the Read Harder Challenge.

I won't bury the lede: As much as I love Sherlock stories, and love that this one stars two Black women, I had a lot of problems with it.  First of all, we don't even meet Holmes until a third of the way through the book, with the mystery not getting started until well past the halfway mark, this thing is agonizingly slowly paced and then just ends with an abrupt info dump.  This is the first book of a series so I figured it's just a first-book info dump and future books will be structured better. (Based on Goodreads reviews, the pacing of the second one is somehow even worse.)

Second problem: Sara Holmes makes no deductions. Zero. None. No deductions. She sometimes looks people up on some spy device she has and says things about them she's Googled or whatever. HOW IS THIS CHARACTER IN ANY WAY SHERLOCK, THE DEDUCTIONS ARE THE ENTIRE POINT. At one point Janet Watson says "is this another one of your deductions?"  What deductions!  They are completely nonexistent deductions!

More problems: Sara is too ordinary a name for a Sherlock analogue character.  Sara drugging Janet was not charming or cute, although fairly Sherlocky, I will grant you. Sara calling Janet "my love" was weird. Was this suppose to be a romance? As much as I adore a Sapphic romance, it did not work for me. Janet somehow is the first person narrator but is also, separately, keeping a journal that we read excerpts of? The whole thing is her journal. So, what?!

Okay one more thing I found this on Book Riot's rec list for this category  and it wasn't until I got to the end that I realized, even though the two main characters are both Black, the author is white.  She fits the challenge because she is a lesbian author.  But she wrote from the point of view of Janet, a Black character, and Sara is also Black. I leave it to non-white readers to decide how well she pulled it off, and there was enough subtlety there to make me think she was thoughtful about it, but... still kind of didn't sit well with me?

Things I liked: god, this thing was promising. The backdrop is a new American Civil War, basically a very near future alternate history.  Janet is a really good character, her PTSD is handled well, and her device (she has a robotic arm) is incorporated well. There is some fun tech here, like self-destroying paper.  I enjoyed Hudson Realty and the fancy apartment.  I read to the end, really hoping these were first installment kinks that would be worked out in future installments but... maybe not.