Book Review

A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas

I was so absorbed in this novel, I read it in one long, very lovely day, the kind of weekend day where you look back with a sort of awed gratitude that you spent most of the daylight hours reading happily. Everything that I found so enthralling about the first book in this series, A Study in Scarlet Women, I found here: layers of meaning, thoughtful scenes and pieces of dialogue, multi-faceted examinations of simple but painful concepts, a wickedly sharp through-line of feminism and subversion, and the sense that each scene and word was placed deliberately, with additional meaning. I followed this book where it led me and was extremely content.

Then I woke up around 3:30am the night after I finished it, my brain spinning and unhappy, similar to the way I woke up after seeing Wonder Woman, fixating on the scene after the mustard gas. Obviously this book is not a romance, but enough is sad and uncertain at the end, my readerly brain struggled with the ending, though the major points of the story are resolved. To put it another way, the mystery is resolved by the final page. The mess that mystery creates is not, and it leaves characters I care about in an uncertain place. Hence my worried brain waking up to fuss about it at 3:30. (My brain is weird.)

I know there has been some question as to whether this can be read as a stand-alone. I think so, though I’m not an entirely trustworthy source because I did read book one, and I really enjoyed it. As a result, I entered this novel with a happy anticipation because I loved the characters and the reinvention of Sherlock Holmes as Charlotte Holmes, but I also entered with next to no memory of what happened in book one. I don’t remember what I was wearing yesterday or what day or year it is; I remember exactly two scenes from A Study in Scarlet Women, and both involved Charlotte eating something (she loves pastry, especially in times of turmoil). So I think this book can be read without having read book one in the series. Some of the events are summarized quickly, or the significance of a scene related to the prior book is explained economically without unnecessary and awkward exposition, so as a reader you won’t miss much. But Scarlet Women is so enjoyable, and explains so much of why Charlotte and Mrs. Watson and the other women in the story are so interesting, I recommend you read it either way.

The mystery setup is pretty simple: Charlotte solves crimes both nefarious and domestic as “Sherlock” Holmes, posing in an elaborately staged ruse as the assistant to her brother, who is ill and must remain in bed. At the start of this book, she is hired by Lord Ingram’s wife. Lord Ingram and Charlotte have a long history together, and a great deal of unresolved emotional and sexual tension. Lady Ingram wants to hire Charlotte to find a man who had been her first love, and who had disappeared without updating her or explaining why he was breaking their annual wordless visit (they walk by one another once a year without speaking). Charlotte takes the case, despite her friend and business partner Mrs. Watson’s hesitation – Lady Ingram is not the most kind person, nor is her marriage to Lord Ingram very happy, and Mrs. Watson’s loyalty is to Charlotte above all. Charlotte has to then negotiate the investigation into this missing person, which is complicated when the missing man is revealed to be her illegitimate half-brother.

The politics of being a woman, being who you genuinely are, and going after what you want are the foundation of much of the tension in this story. Each woman in the story has to deal with how she is perceived by others, and how much power that person might have over her – and that power and perception varies wildly. The story also shifts on who believes what a woman says and why – another form of power. All of those elements combine to inform how the different women react.

For example, Charlotte knows very few men take her seriously, and cannot help but be charmed and curious about intelligent men who do. She also knows she is entirely herself, and doesn’t care what people think. But the people she cares for most, among them her sisters Olivia and Bernadette, are under the control of others, and in Olivia’s case, reside there in part because they are unable to stop caring:

“Life is not easy for Livia – it has never been. She is an intelligent, discerning woman who believes her intelligence and discernment to be of no value.”

“You must have felt the pressure to believe the same.”

“Not at all. It took me a great deal of effort to understand that such pressure exists – I am not sensitive to the opinions of others, individually or as a collective. But Livia is. She is excruciatingly aware of what she is expected to be and how different that is from who she is. Not for a moment does she not feel her shortcomings.

(Emphasis mine.)

A lot happens while Charlotte pursues her case, and I don’t want to give too much away. Each scene and twist in the plot reveals more about the ones just before. There are also a number of people whose existence makes a mess of things for the other characters. Among the most painful scenes were between Inspector Treadles and his wife, Alice. Treadles had a much larger role in the first book, and in this one he is on the periphery of a mystery that involves Holmes almost by accident. Treadles discovers in the first book that there are things he cannot provide for his wife, and that discovery has brought him a great deal of misery. At one point in his book, he asks his wife silently, Why do you want things I can’t possibly give you? Why must you desire power and unwomanly accomplishments? And are you, in the end, also not who I thought you were, not the one I loved and respected? 

Treadles is neck-deep in damaging masculinity and class privilege, and cannot reconcile his wife’s ambitions to run her family company with his own desire that she be happy as his wife and her role in making their home, a home that he provides for them. As Charlotte says in a discussion about Treadles:

And then there are men like Inspector Treadles, an excellent person by almost all standards. But he admires the world as it is and he subscribes to the rules that uphold the world as it is. For him…[a]nyone who breaks the rules endangers the order of the world and should be punished. He does not ask whether the rules are fair; he only cares that they are enforced.

When her comments upset Lord Ingram a little, she adds that Treadles isn’t evil or cruel, but that:

…for him, questioning what he believes – what he believes so deeply he doesn’t even think about – would be more painful than breaking his own kneecaps with a sledgehammer.

It’s unnerving and reassuring to read characters like these and think, “I know someone like that – many someones, in fact.” There’s both a specificity and a universality to the ways in which the different people in this book see the world, which added to my feeling that each word is placed deliberately, and each scene and line is there for a thoughtful reason. As weird as this may sound, I liked very much that this book respected my intelligence, and that multiple characters reflected positions and feelings that I’ve held, or witnessed. There are some situations to which I cannot easily relate for a woman at that time, but there are far more than resonate across time periods on a visceral, personal level.

Another element to this book that I loved was Livia’s repeated attempts to write the story of Sherlock Holmes as fiction – her initial sentences are so amusing (and so terrible). Livia’s love of fiction also relates to her desire to have more control of her world, when she has so little control in the first place:

Charlotte had little use for fiction: She would rather not deal with people altogether if she didn’t have to, real or imaginary. Livia, on the other hand, actively preferred literary characters to real-life acquaintances: Tom Sawyer stayed forever young, Viola always retained her spunk, and Mr. Darcy could never turn out to be a hypocrite who was also disappointing in bed.

Livia, it will probably not surprise you to learn, is one of my favorite characters. I have a lot of respect and admiration for Charlotte, and I admire Mrs. Watson and her niece, but my favorite is probably Livia.

There came a point in the novel where I wasn’t sure exactly what was happening, if Charlotte knew more than she thought, or if she was being (mis)led as I was. But because I know I’m not smarter than some of the individuals in the story, I’m fine with having to follow along until I catch up, or until all is explained. There were a few times when I was pretty sure the book was smarter than me, and there were fewer times when I wanted to warn the characters that something was very wrong. Sometimes, when my suspicions were correct, I was embarrassingly pleased with myself.

When I read a mystery that’s part of a series like this one, I expect that the larger case will be solved, and the character development will move forward another step or two. Both of those things happened in this book, but that development meant that a lot of situations were broken, unsure, or precarious, so I feel the need to warn you that the story might leave you feeling unsettled as well. I was so pleased with the story, how it confused and challenged me with multiple puzzles (the parts where Charlotte solves various kinds of encrypted and coded text, and the history behind those cyphers, was terrific) and I respect how much I learned from and was tricked by the plot, and how intricately it explored issues facing women that were true then and are still true now. But I was still uneasy and restless at the end, knowing how much was uncertain for the characters.

Throughout the story, women cannot escape or undo the power of men over them. Even ruined and socially unacceptable Charlotte is in danger, and Mrs. Watson worries about her safety constantly. Each woman in the story is also burdened with the problem of how she is perceived, which is and is not under her control, and how other people, especially men with power, treat her as a result, especially if she elects to not care about their opinion. There’s a consequence to not caring, and a consequence for caring too much, or not enough – and the questions that originate in each character will keep my brain busy for a long time. This is a thoughtful, clever, absorbing book that will keep you occupied long after you finish it.

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A Conspiracy in Belgravia by Sherry Thomas

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  1. Katty says:

    So, here’s the one question I had when I finished A Study in Scarlet Women and the one that this review also left unanswered: Does Treadles get his head out of his ass?? Seriously, the inflexibility and head-in-ass-ness concerning his wife he displayed at the end of the first book really got to me!

    Sarah, this is a wonderful review and you even touched on Treadles, so thank you for this! Now I just wish this book were a bit cheaper to get… 🙁

  2. CelineB says:

    I liked this one more than the first. I think the pacing felt faster probably because it was a second book and the characters and premise were established. I’ve also been thinking about the characters long after (well a week) since I finished the book. I’m already impatient for the next book to see how the characters and their lives continue to evolve.

  3. Donna Marie says:

    I am so looking forward to this one. First I must survive my dad’s naval reunion this weekend, but then my time is all my own. I plan to wallow in books.

    Thanks for the review, Sarah.

  4. Margaret says:

    Your sense of uncertainty/unease at the end is exactly why I’m a complete coward and have decided not to read ANY of these books until the series is finished. Then I’ll marathon them. I’ve loved everything else I’ve ever ready by Sherry Thomas, including her fabulous YA trilogy, which I also read in one week. Thanks for the great review!

  5. Rebecca says:

    To Katty: Treadles has not yet pulled his head out of his ass. But he is on the periphery of this story so there is hope for the future.

    I just finished an ARC of this installment and really enjoyed it too. Sarah, I also noticed those exact quotes!! I’m glad it wasn’t just me that thought they were so great.

    To Margaret: I personally don’t have to patience to wait for an author to be finished w/a series before starting but I heard on the Reading Glasses podcast that one of the best things to do to support authors you like is to buy/read a series from the get go. Waiting to buy it means that publishers don’t know there is a demand and sometimes series will get dropped. Just a thought. Buy the book now and read later, maybe?

  6. Iris says:

    This is such a wonderfully thoughtful review and I pretty much agree with everything you said. However I am curious which two scenes you remember from A Study In Scarlet Women, and whether one of them is the scene in chapter 1 where we are introduced to Charlotte for the first time? To me that scene is crucial to understanding the circumstances the characters continue to grapple with in A Conspiracy In Belgravia. Also it is just brilliant in the way it establishes so much about Charlotte in little more than a page.

    So I might suggest to anyone who wants to read Conspiracy In Belgravia without reading the first book to read chapter 1 of A Study In Scarlet Women on amazon using the LOOK INSIDE feature. The prologue is also included but really isn’t pertinent to A Conspiracy In Belgravia.

  7. SB Sarah says:

    Thank you so much for the compliments on the review – I really appreciate that!!

    And Iris, yes, the scenes I remember best include Charlotte’s introduction, which was very memorable, and then, later, the one where she’s having tea with Mrs. Watson possibly the first or second time they meet. The tea service and conversation represented so much safety and familiarity to her, I think.

  8. Margaret says:

    Rebecca, I agree completely with your recommendation and it’s what I always do. I purchased this book, like the first one, the day it became available. The only problem with my methodology is that sometimes my patience lasts longer than the poor quality of paper often used in books these days!

  9. Kareni says:

    I’m looking forward to reading this so only skimmed the review for now. Thanks for the post, Sarah; I’ll be back.

  10. JMM says:

    I liked the book, but I find myself… irritated. Once again, an Inconvenient character has been proven to be a villain.

  11. Thank you for this thoughtful review. You articulated many of the thoughts I had on finishing this book, but I too was left feeling…unsettled. On the other hand, the set-up for the next novel is so delicious that I can’t wait to read it!

  12. Laidee Duncan says:

    SB Sarah! My Sista from another Mr! Gurl, I just discovered this series (SB for me means So Behind the pop culture curve). Anywho, you sooo spoke my truth regarding the relevant quotes, likeable characters and most of all what I refer to as the overall “What did I miss?” feel of this series: or “okay.wait.what?” in SB Sonya shorthand.
    So…question. Any idea how, when, why Charlotte knew Lady Ingram was “responsible for 3 deaths” as Lord Ingram says in the final confrontation? Who are the 3? What did Charlotte uncover/at what point did she discover who was en league with Moriarty? Another thing I wish I were clear on is, what key in the riddle did Mrs. Burns unlock by saying who she used to be in service for?

    This series needs a handbook!
    I look forward to any and all insights.

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