Sherry Thomas (A Study in Scarlet Women; The Luckiest Lady in London) continues her delightfully feminist, gender-swapped Sherlock Holmes series with a sixth entry: Miss Moriarty, I Presume? Charlotte Holmes, detective extraordinaire and lover of sweets, is astonished when her new client, known as Mr. Baxter, is none other than Mr. Moriarty. "Mr. Baxter" insists on Holmes's help in tracking down his daughter, who has been living in an occult commune in Cornwall. He has sent a cleaning lady to spy on Miss Baxter periodically, but she hasn't seen Miss Baxter for months, and Moriarty wants Holmes to find out why.
Unable safely to refuse Moriarty's request, Holmes and her lover, Lord Ingram, head to Cornwall with Mrs. Watson, Holmes's landlady, to see what they can find out. And they discover mysteries indeed: Miss Baxter doesn't emerge from her cottage even when a fire begins nearby, and clearly several of the commune's residents are hiding things. As the situation becomes ever more dangerous, Holmes, Mrs. Watson and Lord Ingram also realize that Moriarty cares more about entrapping Holmes than he does about finding his own daughter.
Atmospheric and fast-paced, Miss Moriarty, I Presume? is Sherlockian fiction at its finest. Fans of Laurie R. King or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself are sure to adore the way that Sherry Thomas leaves her readers guessing until the end. Thomas does an excellent job of capturing Victorian English society and mixing it neatly with Moriarty's sinister ploys and Holmes's intuitive leaps, to create a novel perfect for devouring. --Jessica Howard, bookseller at Bookmans, Flagstaff, Ariz.