A Study in Ashes by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Ashes
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.

Wow! Nine ebook reviews in three weeks was the challenge and I just met it! Now I see one of Net Galley's patented 'three week deadline' notices has just popped up on this one, as well! Never again will I offer to read so many ebooks in so short a time! Fortunately some of those nine (three or four) were real clunkers, so I didn't have to read them all the way through before I knew how to rate them! The rest were acceptable enough that reading them didn't seem like a slog at all.

Anyway, this is the final review in my foray into the first three of Holloway's niece of Sherlock Holmes novels! And yes, I promise you it is the final review I shall do of any of her novels in this series. I have absolutely no desire to read any more. A Study in Ashes is a truly fitting name for a conclusion to this series since it all came to ashes in the end. I reviewed A Study in Silks at the beginning of October, and A Study in Darkness towards the end of that month. The first of these two I liked, the second I thought was awful. The third went downhill from there.

The problem with this series is that it's fundamentally fraudulent: I mean, why even mention Sherlock Holmes in your novel and book blurb, let alone boast a main character who's his niece, and then betray every single thing for which Holmes stood by rendering his supposed Protégé into a complete Mary Clueless, who actually does near to zero investigating? Why invest in a girl who has shown herself to be completely undisciplined, a non-thinker, slow, witless, shiftless, thoughtless, and boring? She's much better qualified to pursue what she does best, and incessantly: bemoaning her fate, and pining for Nick-ed the thief, aka worthless piece of trash, and when she's not suffering the wilts and the vapors over him, pining for Toby-ass the worthless piece of trash. I can't respect a character like that, much less actually root for her, or want to read about her. The idea for this series was really cool, but it was sorrowfully wasted in execution (execution is what these stories begged for!). The pseudo steam-punk was a nice touch, but it never really got off the ground in any useful sense except for sensationalism. I could have done happily without the Deva's, notwithstanding how amusing Bird and Mouse were, but even they would have been tolerable had the detective we were implicitly promised actually showed up for work. She never did.

I tried to get into this particular volume three or four times, but after wading through the first half-dozen or so chapters and skimming some of the others, I could find nothing in it to even generate my interest, let alone sustain it! The most interesting character, Imogen, was completely AWOL in the portions that I read. Evelina, supposedly the main character, did nothing but show herself to be clueless, impotent, incompetent, and morbidly self-centered. She once had a job (in volume two) where she could learn everything she wanted, but she had evidently passed that up (for whatever reason) by volume three, to go to a school where all she's allowed to learn (in that era) are 'proper lady's' topics. She's apparently content with this since she resists being thrown out of the college.

Toby-ass proves himself to be an even bigger shit in this novel than he achieved in either of the previous two, which takes some believing: now he has a wife and a son neither of whom he gives a damn about. I can see some logic to his having problems with a wife who was forced upon him, but I cannot countenance his treatment of her. She was a good, fun, and interesting person, and his behavior towards her is not only ungentlemanly, it's thoroughly unconscionable in someone who is supposed to be one of the good guys. Why would I like a jerk such as him, or be interested in what he wants does, thinks, or feels? Alice, his wife, is nowhere in sight in this novel either (not in the portion I read), which is a shame, because she was my second favorite character after Imogen.

But it's not his treatment of her which completely writes him off, since I fully expect this numb-nuts to behave badly towards women; no, the killer is his treatment of his son. That's completely unacceptable to me, and for Evelina to harbor feelings for this jerk tells me a lot about her - a lot of unpleasant things, that is. I have no interest in learning any more about any of these privileged losers, so I said, "The hell with this series!" Life is too short to waste it on pointless, uninteresting, and even downright irritating prose. I'm glad to be done with this un-nourishing stubble and moving to graze on greener pastures.

A Study in Darkness by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Darkness
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: WARTY!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.

I reviewed A Study in Silks, the first novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Yes, I know I said I was just starting this one! I did start it, but I had to put it on a hasty hold when I discovered, much to my dismay, that several books I have for review for Net Galley were showing "three weeks" deadlines in the reader: read it by then or lose it forever! I've never seen that before, but then I've never had so many ebooks lined up for review before, either, so I had to go take care of some of them before I can get back to this one! Sorry! Corporate responsibility and all that jazz....

However, I find myself this weekend not in a position to read the current deadline novel. There's no kindle edition of it, the Adobe reader doesn't work on Ubuntu, and Kindle won't read the PDF which is a protected file! Yes, they have it nailed down tightly, but that means I can't do what they expect me to do: review it for them! So I'm back to reading the "Study" series, but I have to report mixed feelings about what I'm reading. On the one hand, she doesn't know the difference between a decent romance and YA crapola. On the other, and this is a very pleasant surprise, Holloway does know the difference between stanch and staunch! Kudos to her for that much at least.

Anyone following my blog will know that I've identified (if I recall) three writers of late who do not know the difference, and as a writer, I think things like this are important because they tell us something about the author, and about book editors. If you cannot trust your publisher to get the cover right, and you cannot trust the blurb writer to get the back-cover right, and you cannot trust your editor to catch things like confusion between two similar words with entirely different meanings, then where is the advantage of going the legacy publishing route? Self-publish! But only if you are strong in your written language, and confident in being able to do the job yourself. However, if you got the other route, do be prepared for serious cluelessness, blindness, and moronic publishers who do not recognize talent when they see it. Recall that the following record companies turned down The Beatles in the early 1960's: Columbia, Decca, Oriole, Philips and Pye. Decca told them that guitar groups were on the way out, and that The Beatles had no future in show business! Don't lose heart. Unless, of course, you write romances as badly as Holloway does!

I must now address a serious shortcoming which shows up disturbingly in the first ten percent of this novel, and which is the sad debasing of Evelina. You will recall if you read volume one in this series that Holloway smartly tore up her playbook at the end, and scattered her four main protagonists, which I considered a very good decision. Imogen, Evelina's best friend was separated from both Evelina (who was banished from Lord Bancroft's home), and from her beau, Bucky, who was banned from her life. Niccolo, whom I consider to be a complete loser, became a pirate. That should convey all you need to know about his worthless hide, and that's also all I need to say about him - except to add that once I discovered that he was in this novel, I decided to skip every chapter in which he plays a leading role (which meant gliding happily past all of chapters five and six, for example). My worst fear is that he will not be hunted down and hung, but will come roaring back into the story, and it seems that fear is to become a reality. Indeed, Holloway starts this story with him, which I found depressing enough as it was.

And what of Evelina? Well, we learn nothing of her summer except that she was in Devon, a county in south-west England, but is now back staying with her uncle Sherlock Holmes in Baker Street, where she receives a letter from Imogen begging her to join herself and Alice Keating for a month before Tobias (or sorry-ass if you prefer - I do) marries Alice. Evelina has an attack of the wilts and the vapors over this, at which point she lost me as her champion. She's supposed to be a smart, strong, astute, incisive sleuth, but she's none of that so far in this novel, nor at all in the first novel. She displays none of her uncle's intellect whatsoever. Holloway actually uses the term "star-crossed" to describe Evelina and Tobias, which pretty much made me puke all over the Kindle (not advised).

Holloway needs to buck-up Evelina and get her mind away from that loser Tobias, who purposefully shot her uncle and would have killed him if he could. How did Che put it in Don't Cry for me Argentina: "Why all this howling hysterical sorrow?" This pathetic juvenile fainting away over him is entirely stomach-turning. Evelina needs to be given a new beau: someone worthy of what she can be, and she herself needs to become worthy to have him. Right now she's worthless as a character and as a human being. Holloway seems to have got it right with Imogen and Bucky (although there is precious little of either of them in this volume), so hopefully she'll bite the bullet and get it done for Evelina too, but I have grave doubts on that score. I think she's far too in love with her characters to ever dare kill them off, either practically or metaphorically, but maybe she'll surprise me.

Or maybe she won't. I almost tossed this novel at about 20% in, and moved on to something else. Sad-sack Tobias, of course, shows up at the hunting jamboree organized by Jasper Keating, the "Gold" King (steam-punk supremo). There was absolutely no surprise what-so-ever there. Neither was it a surprise when trollop Evelina and scum Tobias, fiancé of Alice Keating, (who happens to be a friend of Evelina's) flung themselves into each other's arms, neither of them caring two figs for Alice. So exactly how Dumb is Evelina? Don't get me started. And what kind of a lowlife jerk-off is Toby-ass? Evelina had one simple task at this hunter-gathering: to dig up useful information for her uncle and she blew it the very first chance she got, wilting like a used condom in the arms of the useless piece of trash who shot her uncle and contributed to building a bomb which blew up Holmes's home when he and Evelina were both in it. And now this faithless wench is having palpitations over this terrorist?

This novel was entirely unrealistic even within its own framework to this point. Evelina, supposedly a strong female lead, has shown herself to be completely worthless in her character's rôle, and nothing more than another air-headed appendage of a guy. And the guy is - how did Colonel Brandon put it in Sense & Sensibility? - "...expensive, dissipated, and worse than both." Alan Rickman's Colonel Brandon described Toby-ass's character best in the movie version: "the worst sort of libertine". I need more than this in a main character if an author wants me to follow a series; much more. But at least we now know where the novel's title came from: it was in Keating's study, in the darkness, that they kissed, and Keating and Imogen found them in flagrante de lick spittle. Now not only is Toby-ass under Keating's thumb, so too, is Evelina. Way to go, Ms Stupid Bitch! Seriously: is it Holloway's intention to make a reader detest her characters? If so, then why?! If not, then why write this crap?

Fortunately, I didn't ditch the novel at that point. Though I was revolted by Holloway's ham-fisted handling of Evelina-Toby-ass train-wreck, I kept reading and was rewarded. So she gets kicked out of the hunter-gathering and heads back to London incognito as a spy for Keating, and she ends up working for Magnus - the guy who got blown up in volume one, but who we all of us knew for a fact would be back, because why invent a new villain when you can quite literally resurrect an old one?! Right now my favorite character in both of these volumes is Magnus. At least he has something going for him - like a spine maybe?!

Magnus is laying low, and apparently working for (or perhaps merely pretending to do so) King Coal, another of the steam barons. He runs a puppet theater, although why he does, I have no idea; there's no reason whatsoever for him to be doing this as far as I can see, especially if he has King Coal's patronage, and Holloway offers none. He is maintaining a stable of automatons, one of which is the very Serafina doll which was purportedly destroyed in volume one. No explanation there as to why she's still hale and hearty, and Serafina has a life of sorts. She's very advanced, verging on being sentient if not already there, and Magnus assures Evelina that he has killed no-one and no animal to create her as she is. OTOH, this novel is set during the era of Jack the Ripper - the very villain about whom Imogen is having very realistic dreams. I am now suspicious that Serafina is Jack the Ripper and these deaths are what animate her. But then we all know exactly how great my guesses are!

So now Holloway has married off Toby-ass to Alice Keating, the only way she can get Toby-ass and Evelina together is to kill off Alice. Will she do it? She really jumped the shark, fell short, and landed ass-first in the fish's maw with the kiss in the study in darkness, because the only witnesses to that event were Evelina, Toby-ass, Keating, and Imogen. But now Holloway expects us to believe that the story somehow magically "slipped out", and has spread so that everyone at the reception knows of it. How, exactly, did that happen? No explanation. Everyone is evidently blaming Evelina, but there's no word yet on whether Alice has even heard the tale.

Well, I got to 50% through this novel and became so ill that I could no longer continue. It sucks. There are some really brilliant pieces, but all of that is lost in a foul miasma of tedious pedantry and brain-dead story-telling. It turns out that Toby-ass seduced Alice during the summer and impregnated her, and then he doesn't have the gallantry to spend their wedding night with her or treat her like a human being. There is no way in hell this piece of human gutter-trash will ever get back into my good graces, and if Evelina ends up with him, then she's scum too as far as I'm concerned! It's that simple. Why would I care what happens to these whiny-assed losers? The sad thing is that I have a third volume of this to which I'm committed for a review. I have the horrible feeling that I may indeed end up committed - to an asylum when I start delving into that volume! But rest-assured I am going to take a serious break from this before I read episode three!

This novel is WARTY!

A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway

Title: A Study in Silks
Author: Emma Jane Holloway
Publisher: Gallery Books
Rating: worthy!

DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration of any kind for this review.

Erratum:
p262 "His mouth twitch with ire." should be "His mouth twitched with ire."

I reviewed A Study in Darkness, the second novel in this series, here.

I reviewed A Study in Ashes, the third novel in this series, here.

Evelina Cooper is a niece of Sherlock Holmes. I had thought this must be through his older brother Mycroft, but it was a case of identity: Holloway has invented a non-existent sister called Marianne, who ran away to the circus! Now Evelina is an orphan with an overbearing grandmother. I was not impressed by this. I have to ask, Holloway my dear, What's on? I chose this novel and its two sequels (so I can review all three in a row) because it sounded like a great idea for a series, and I really loved the opening few pages: it really got hold of me and pulled me in, but I was led to expect a Holmes-esque novel and did not get one.

There's a wood sprite which appeared when Evelina was escaping from an attic by climbing out of the window and into a nearby tree. Yes, I was expecting elementary and got an elemental! Clearly the publicist is the man with the twisted lip - or is he the crooked man? So I'm thinking: did I just get duped by a freight and ditch? This was not at all what I come looking for when I'm told by a book blurb that this is a novel about Sherlock Holmes's niece! So we have Holmes, magic, fantasy, paranormal, automatons, demons, detectives, and steam-punk. Hmm. Why make her a relation of Sherlock Holmes and then leave me Strand-ed, betraying everything Arthur Doyle stood for in his delivery of the Holmes adventures? This Baker Street irregular made no sense to me, especially since there's really nothing in this novel, not even the appearance of Holmes himself, which reflects anything of the Doyle novels. Should I give it the five orange pips?

After getting past the beginning with no issues, I quickly started having some really mixed feelings about it. Okay, so we finally get a murder and Evelina is really doing a cracking job of sussing-out the clues, but no sooner do we have what I actually came looking for in this novel than I get handed the second stain: Holloway tosses in a completely gratuitous and appallingly tropish love triangle between her and a high-born heir to a lordship and also a lowlife from the circus. Honestly? Why in hell do women of all genders, aspire to write novels about strong female characters, and then hobble these same women with a crippling need for, and attendant dependency upon, the validation of not one but two, count 'em, two dancing men? And iffy men at that: these men are such clichés as to be truly, seriously, painfully pathetic.

I have to confess that she does make an effort with these two - to try and give them some substance - but at that point she'd already lost my good faith and wasn't making enough of an effort to regain it! I committed to reading and reviewing three of these novels (the first three in what is evidently an ongoing series), so I found myself dearly hoping this would improve, and Holloway started to come through for me as I read on, but she was too inconsistent, making me first enjoy what I read and then making me regret it by turns! For example, she made me fall in love with her for this one sentence on p123: "Silence resounded with all the majesty of an oriental gong." I have no idea why, but that just hit me right where my pleasure nodes are. Unfortunately, she came around one hundred eighty degrees right after that and saddened me.

She has now presented Evelina as secretly wanting marriage all along, and only deflected from that course by her impoverished circumstances. That seems unnecessarily genderist even in these circumstances. I know that Victorian women were raised this way, and all-too-many girls still are today, but even in reality not all Victorian women felt that way, nor traveled that path. There is no reason at all to present a fictional woman as being brain-washed by that idea unless your plot demands it. In this case, Holloway's plot does no such thing as far as I can tell; quite the opposite in fact, so why sell her main character down this particular river? I was very disappointed with this approach. However, as much as Holloway toys with my affections, addicting me one minute, and repelling me the next, I decided it was worth it, on balance, continue to read this. I pretty much have to if I'm going to proceed to volume two, and thence to three, anyway!

Here's another reason to love Holloway: "Even a stupid servant was more versatile and cost a fraction of the price." (p153). I am so glad she's smart enough to see the impracticality of a lot of the steam-punk stuff, favoring servants over automatons (although morally, it ought to be the other way around!) - so why can't she apply those obvious smarts to relationships and love triangles?! It's a bigger mystery than was Boscombe Valley, but that's not a patch on this howler exactly one third the way in describing an interaction between Evelina and one of her two male interests, Tobias, the wealthy son of a lord: "Her palms brushed the front of his jacket, feeling the soft, expensive fabric and the swell of firm, young muscle beneath. An ache throbbed deep in her body, blotting out common sense." Seriously? Evelina loves her a firm young muscle...!

Holloway improves things as she continues the story of the relationship between Evelina and Tobias, and it starts to mature intelligently and does have a real surprise at the end, which I didn't expect, so I can tell you without giving too much away that this love triangle did not go the way I had feared it would when I first read of it. Nick OTOH, is unsavory at best and pretty much went exactly where I thought he ought to end up even as I feared he wouldn't go there! I can say that Evelina continued to impress and develop, and that was where my main interest lay. And the story did stay focused, more or less, on the thing which first attracted Evelina's attention before it side-tracked into the magical.

Page 271 was interesting from my own oddball writerly perspective. I felt I'd entered a time loop when I clicked back a page. I had clicked back because I thought I'd clicked two pages forward instead of one (I hadn't, but this is a problem with ebooks and the Kindle). This page starts with "At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." and ends with "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage." So what happened to me was that in clicking from that page to the same page, thinking it was the next, I read: "The barons are catching us, one by one, by holding our pocketbooks hostage. At a quick calculation, Evelina counted a dozen men who were baronet or better." It flows perfectly and took me a second to realize what I’d done. Minor weirding-out there!

But that’s not an authorship problem; in my case, it was a clueless reader problem! Maybe it's also of interest to an author interested in writing one of those self-navigation stories. These used to be common at one time, but are rare now. They’re interactive in a limited way, because at each page, you choose which page to jump to next from a selection of options presented at the bottom of the page. You could have your reader weirded-out quite nicely with a page like this one!

P271 was also of interest in that it sported this sickening sentence: "His hand on her arm sent a pleasant shiver down the back of her legs." It was a bit much, especially after I'd been feeling better about the YA trope romance between Tobias and Evelina. The worst parts were offset somewhat by Holloway's detailing of how smart Evelina was, for example when she turned away from the crowd and whispered to Tobias in order to avoid being overheard or having her lips read. Some might call that paranoid, but in the context of the novel it was very smart and I loved Evelina for doing it and, in turn, Holloway for writing that bit! Yes, I'm a sap for that kind of thing and not ashamed to admit it into polite company!

But later, Holloway makes the mistake of having Tobias use this Americanism: "I've always known you came from someplace different..." No son of a British lord, and especially not one in Victorian times, would use 'someplace'. It's 'somewhere'! That's a minor faux pas, but I kept getting vertigo from getting to a high point where I really enjoyed the writing, and then having the text swoop down low for one reason or another, before climbing back up again with the next Evelina bounty. And rest assured Evelina was not the only character who was worth the reading. Her best friend Imogen was equally entertaining, and didn't get anywhere near enough air time for my money (not that I paid any actual money!). Her relationship with "Bucky" was charming and entertaining to a wonderfully high degree - but not enough!

I do not, however, love Nick. The the final problem is that he is the creeping man, and not at all the kind of person with whom I would wish for a young lady of Miss Cooper sensitivities to spend her time. Holloway needs to kill him off heroically (she doesn't!). He is nothing but a horn-dog who has little respect for Evelina, spends the bulk of his time lusting after her, and comes uncomfortably close to raping her at one point in the novel, when he's in the throes of a magical communion with her. It's actually rather sickening, and even scary given his penchant for stalking Evelina. I don't like him at all as a character or as a friend of hers, so I was glad that he went the way he did, but not at all happy to discover that he's featured in the second of this series, as, I assume, is Tobias, or Toby-ass as he now ought to be known.

So in summary, I am rating this novel a worthy read, even though I did have a few issues with it. I had hoped for no magic or steam-punk, no fantasy, and definitely no trope romance, so why Holloway went there, I don't know, and given that she obviously had decided to go there, I can't understand why she chose to have Evelina related to Sherlock Holmes, unless it was nothing more than a cheap ploy to try and pull in readers. I suspect Holmes fans will be as annoyed and resentful of this ploy as I was. It seemed underhand to me to talk the reader up one way and then pull the rug out and send them another. This is no Sherlock Holmes tale, not even in spirit (and he is the dying detective!). It is, however, an entertaining tale for the most part, and even some of the magical stuff, particularly, Evelina's robotic mouse and bird, was really entertaining. The novel would have stood by itself without the Holmes Crutch to lean on. I have to wonder why no editor advised Holloway thus. But I am still giving this the the engineer's thumb up and moving on to volume two to see what I can find there.