Enola Holmes is hiding from the world?s most famous detective?her own brother, Sherlock Holmes. But when she discovers a hidden cache of bold, brilliant charcoal drawings, she can?t help but venture out to find who drew them: young Lady Cecily, who has disappeared from her bedroom without a trace. Braving midnight streets where murderers roam, Enola must unravel the clues?a leaning ladder, a shifty-eyed sales clerk, political pamphlets?but in order to save Lady Cecily from a powerful villain, Enola risks revealing more than she should . . .

‘The Case Of The Left-Handed Lady‘, the second Enola Holmes book, was as much fun as the first book, ‘The Case Of The Missing Marquess‘ and had a few surprises along the way.

The mystery at the heart of the story was improbable in a very Sherlock Holmes sort of way. It made full use of the threatening streets of London’s East End, was driven by an evil genius, required more than one party to wear a disguise and drew some of its menace from popular ‘dark’ topics of the time: anarchism and mesmerism. I enjoyed the imagery and was carried through the plot by Enola’s passion for finding out what was going on.

As in the first book, Enola is the main source of energy in the book. I like her drive, her independence and her bravery but it’s her loneliness and her anxieties and her anger that make her more than a plot device.

The main surprise in the book was in the way Nancy Springer presented Victorian England. In many books, particularly cosy mysteries written by American authors, Victorian London is sanitised. Yes, it’s a dark and dangerous place but in a theme park, soft focus sort of way that doesn’t match the social and economic realities of the time. Nancy Springer doesn’t do that. She confronts Enola Holmes with the reality of the repressive nature of the class system, the consequences of dire poverty, the suppression of protest and the ubiquity of misogyny. 

I liked the way that these themes were filtered through Enola’s eyes. She has no difficulty seeing the misogyny. She was raised by a mother who was a committed suffragist and strongly independent. She’s also willing to play a spooky version of Lady Bountiful, walking through the nighttime streets of the East End in winter, doing what she can to prevent people from dying of cold or hunger. Yet, when she listens to a talented orator rousing the workers to anger about their inability to control the hours that they work or what they get paid and use of the police to bludgeon them into submission when they march in protest, she remains true to her class and dismisses the complaints as nonsense.

I’m hooked on this series now, so I went looking for the rest of the books and found that Audible has included a number of them in my membership, which means I could download them for free. They’re narrated by Katherine Kellgren, who narrated the ‘Her Royal Spyness‘ series.