A Study in Honor (2018)
Written by: Claire O’Dell (aka Beth Bernobich)
Genre: Science Fiction
Series: Janet Watson Chronicles, book 1
Pages: 304 (Kindle)
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Why I chose it: Because everyone was talking about it, so it kept crossing my path. Because I’m a big Sherlock Holmes fan and love the near endless variety of “Holmesian” stories. Because it just sounded interesting. Because I love feminist retellings of canon heroes. Pick one, pick more than one; they’re all true.
The Premise:
Dr. Janet Watson knows firsthand the horrifying cost of a divided nation. While treating broken soldiers on the battlefields of the New Civil War, a sniper’s bullet shattered her arm and ended her career. Honorably discharged and struggling with the semi-functional mechanical arm that replaced the limb she lost, she returns to the nation’s capital, a bleak, edgy city in the throes of a fraught presidential election. Homeless and jobless, Watson is uncertain of the future when she meets another black and queer woman, Sara Holmes, a mysterious yet playfully challenging covert agent who offers the doctor a place to stay.
Watson’s readjustment to civilian life is complicated by the infuriating antics of her strange new roommate. But the tensions between them dissolve when Watson discovers that soldiers from the New Civil War have begun dying one by one—and that the deaths may be the tip of something far more dangerous, involving the pharmaceutical industry and even the looming election. Joining forces, Watson and Holmes embark on a thrilling investigation to solve the mystery—and secure justice for these fallen soldiers.
There will be spoilers!
Discussion:
I am going to admit straight off that this book was nearly a DNF for me. I finished it because well, I’d bought it, and I hate to waste book money.
So it’s clear I didn’t enjoy it. The question is why? Because this book should have been exactly up my alley. Female iterations of Holmes and Watson, solving crimes, getting along like gangbusters? Sign me up!
SPOILERS BELOW
Let’s start with the things I did like. There were quite a few of them!
The world-building is effective. A new American Civil War would be horrifying, and while I could quibble about her dividing lines (geographically), the ideology and the split felt depressingly plausible. Especially in this day and age, when one half of the country seems determined to get rid of the other half.
The setting feels really grounded. I was immersed immediately. And I thought Janet’s struggle with bureaucracy was oddly fascinating, even if maddening.
I liked Janet! I thought she made a great Watson. I liked her backstory, and I liked both her despair (earned) and her determination to not let the situation she’s in defeat her.
Honestly, I enjoyed the first third of the book quite a lot. I cared about Janet’s struggles to find a job, find a better prosthetic, and do her best for the patients in a system that really didn’t care one whit about any soldier not actually on the battlefield. I thought that was excellent and too real—the gap of care. Dead soldiers are tragic and motivation for people to do things in their name and in the name of nationalism. Live soldiers on the battlefield are heroic and urge you to support your country! Wounded soldiers, PTSD soldiers—well, they’re inconvenient. They want things. And they want them from you….
I liked Janet poking around and sticking her nose where it didn’t belong. I liked that she recognized that the care these soldiers was receiving was substandard and that she knew it from a medical standpoint. It’s not just a “feeling”; she’s a doctor working below her level of expertise in the only job she could find, and she was unimpressed with her “superiors”.
When a patient dies unexpectedly, and she starts looking into the whys of her death? And things immediately rise up and bite her in the ass? Yeah, that was great. I was still hooked.
Then Sara Holmes took over, and the book nose-dived for me.
A digression of sorts: let’s talk about what makes a Watson/Holmes story.
John Watson (the original), as a character, is fairly straight-forward, though he shouldn’t be mistaken for simple. In canon, he’s a sturdy military man, a doctor who did his duty until he was wounded and was invalided home to England. He finds his military pension doesn’t cover as much as he would like, meets Holmes, and moves in. He becomes Holmes’s partner or sidekick or amanuensis or friend or what have you—all of the above, usually.
But Watson’s core characterization is about more than his history. He’s solid to the bone; he’s unimaginative, but far from stupid. He’s loyal to his friends and to his country. He’s confident and competent and capable. He’s a good egg. And, let’s not forget, in all incarnations, he’s extraordinary enough of a personality to catch and keep Holmes’s affections and respect.
Sherlock Holmes: well, there are as many Holmes as there are multi-verses. But the successful ones hit these salient markers:
His memory is as prodigious as his intellect, and all the information he cares to learn is floating about freely in his head.
He’s equal parts showboat and teacher. He likes it when people praise his skills at deduction, but he’s also constantly pulling back the curtain, showing them how it was done. He writes monographs and distributes them so others can learn as well.
He’s only impatient when he expects better of someone, and that includes himself.
He’s kind. It might be masked, but over and over again in the canon, he shows himself to be capable of kindness. (Do not get me started on the modern iterations which suggest he either can’t read a social cue even while ascertaining what the person had for breakfast, or he’s deliberately riding roughshod over people’s emotions because he can.)
And of course, he’s fascinating. He pushes boundaries, but in a way that’s always intriguing to the reader and to Watson. He, too, is loyal to his country and his friends.
But really beyond all that, any Holmes and Watson story relies on a certain spark of recognition between the two characters. That shiny moment of “Oh yes, you and me, together. What things we could do!” That spark of kindred souls meeting. They make each other better.
And then there’s Sara Holmes.
Sara Holmes is a spy—I can accept that as a Holmes variant; a little odd to imagine her reporting to anyone and being under anyone’s command, but it’s not a deal breaker.
Her prodigious memory is tied inextricably into her wetware linkage to the internet. Which makes her feel like a clever researcher, not a native genius who has carefully curated vast amounts of information specific to her interests and needs.
And she rarely explains herself in any useful way. She is a show-boater, but it’s in glamor—fancy clothes and food, elaborate gifts—and in shadowy connections and string-pulling. None of it seems built on ratiocination. She is not a teacher.
She does things to Watson that are not merely boundary-pushing, but actually criminal: drugging Janet without her knowledge, imprisoning her “for her own good”, snooping through her mail, her belongings, allowing other people in the government to do so….
This book is called A Study in Honor, and this Holmes has none. As a spy, that makes sense. Spies believe in expedience over ideals. As a nod to the original? Not so much. Holmes is, in most incarnations, a gentleman. So that sat poorly with me.
But the real problem was simply that Watson and Holmes never sparked for me.
Sara Holmes might have been charming, but she felt artificial and superficial. For the first third of the book, Watson looks on Holmes as a distant, perplexing roommate who occasionally cooks delicious meals for her or takes her out for a night on the town.
For me, I never felt that moment of connection.
So when Holmes decides (for reasons never really explained) that Janet’s stumbled into a piece of Sara’s current puzzle, she takes over the mystery and the book. From that point on, Janet is reduced to baggage, swept along blindly on Holmes’ great spy caper.
It’s… unsatisfying, partly because O’Dell hasn’t built up the bizarre pride and respect Watson feels for canon Holmes, which allows the reader to feel vicariously that Holmes’ triumph is Watson’s triumph, too. Instead, Janet wanders along, bewildered, in Holmes’ wake. Do this, do that, now we fly to another city.
Part of this is that Janet is so well-fleshed out, and so centered in her own problems, that she just doesn’t have space to spare to be fascinated or obsessed with Holmes’s comings and goings.
Most Holmes stories really begin with the reveal of Holmes’s abilities and casework and Watson’s amazed and admiring reaction to said reveal. Instead, Janet reacts with horror and flees: Sara can read her history and Janet finds it unbearable. So from the very beginning there are issues with boundaries. In most variations, Holmes’ boundary-pushing ways are made more palatable by the fact that Watson first reacted with astonishment and no personal dismay.
I also found the solution to the mystery flat-out infuriating.
A reminder: SPOILERS, LOOK AWAY!
The mystery that the reader cares about is who is killing a certain brigade of soldiers and why? Sara spends a long time, as does Janet, trying to figure out why the New Confederacy wants this group of soldiers dead. The problem is, since all these deaths are taking place after the battle field, in the safety of their home turf, aided and abetted by their own government conspiring to hide these deaths, the idea of blaming the “other side” just never flies.
For the mystery to then devolve to the flat-out comic booky “oh the pharmaceutical complex was testing a formula for super soldiers and it went wrong so they’re covering their trail” really annoyed me. Do not get me wrong, I love super soldiers! But not in this setting.
There is one other significant peril in creating a Holmes pastiche. The villains are instantly recognizable, their names as infamous as Holmes’s is famous. Moran, Moriarty, and in this case, Adler. The minute she rolls onto the page, it’s game over, you’ve found the bad guy. So O’Dell did the only thing she could and kept it to the very last second. The problem is that I found it hard to believe they only came to the conclusion regarding pharmaceuticals being part of the issue when Janet’s first patient betrays health problems—probably as a result of her medication.
Plus, this plot-line should have given Janet a great opportunity to figure something out using her medical knowledge, but nope! She’s mostly irrelevant to the storyline, except to be shot and out of the picture while the storyline wraps up. In the end, Janet is in a better position than she was—a new arm, a new job, but… you know, it felt like a bribe. A pat on the head. Yet another string pulled by Sara, and nothing that Janet had earned. She deserved it, for certain, but she didn’t get it herself!
In conclusion:
In the end, A Study in Honor left me irritated. The book has its pluses: I thought the world was depressing, yet intriguing. I liked the complexity of the “good side”; that it might be better than the outright religious and classist bigots of the New Confederacy, but things weren’t all unicorns and kittens on the other side. Watson still had to deal with racism–the institutional kind that lets people assume she’s in the wrong (read expensive) neighborhood. She had to deal with the casual dismissal of her experiences from the government representatives. If she got angry, she was considered irrational. If she stayed quiet, nothing changed. I liked all of that.
Frankly, I liked Janet Watson. I would have read a whole book just about her struggles, her attempt to get back to being a surgical doctor, her attempt to solve a crime against her patients who she obviously cared for. There was more connection between Janet and her doomed patient Belinda than I ever saw with her and Holmes.
Janet Watson was a well-drawn character and a believable Watson. I just wish she’d been given a Holmes to match.
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