Watson offers her a position as her paid companion.īefore her disgrace, Charlotte had created the pseudonym of 'Sherlock Holmes' to pass tips about newsworthy crimes through her childhood friend, Lord Ingram Ashburton, to Ashburton's friend, Inspector Treadles of the Metropolitan Police.

Joanna Watson, whose husband was an army doctor killed in Afghanistan. Rather than accept her parents' sentence of exile to the family's country estate, Charlotte leaves home for a London boarding house, to look for work as a secretary.Īfter several weeks without success, Charlotte meets a wealthy widow, Mrs. Instead of preventing the rendezvous, Shrewsbury's wife and mother lie in wait and burst in on the two in flagrante, ensuring that Charlotte's disgrace is total. Unfortunately, the young man she chooses to seduce, Roger Shrewsbury, is an 'idiot', who gets drunk and, mistaking his own wife for another one of his mistresses, tells her all about his planned assignation with Charlotte. If he does not support her, she will let everyone know and ruin the family. Her father agrees, but later reneges.Ĭharlotte decides that the 'logical' alternative is lose her maidenhead in secret and blackmail her father into paying for her education. Before her first Season, Charlotte, declaring herself uninterested in marriage, strikes a bargain with her father: she will participate in the Season, but if she does not accept any potential suitors, her father will finance her education to become the headmistress of a girls' school (one of the few vocations in Victorian England which allows an unmarried woman a sufficient income). After all, they don't interfere in his life.Charlotte Holmes has no choice but to deal with them-and how she deals with them would define the paths of her life.' Ĭharlotte creates the fiction of a 'Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective' and masquerades as his sister to solve crimes within the limited opportunities for women in Victorian England.Ĭharlotte Holmes, the youngest daughter of the noble-but-impoverished Lord and Lady Holmes, possesses a razor-keen intellect and unique talents for observation and deductive reasoning, but her parents under-value these gifts, declaring them off-putting to a potential husband. 'A Sherlock Holmes has the luxury of not thinking about such rules.

In the novel, Thomas gender-flips Sherlock Holmes into Charlotte Holmes.

It is the first novel of Thomas' 'Lady Sherlock series'. A Study in Scarlet Women is a mystery by Sherry Thomas.

Sherlock holmes & a study in scarlet