Tag Archives: brittany cavallaro

Read This!: A QUESTION OF HOLMES by Brittany Cavallaro

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A Question of Holmes (Charlotte Holmes #4)A Question of Holmes by Brittany Cavallaro

Summary: Charlotte Holmes and Jamie Watson think they’re finally in the clear. They’ve left Sherringford School—and the Moriartys—behind for a pre-college summer program at Oxford University. A chance to start from scratch and explore dating for the first time, while exploring a new city with all the freedom their program provides. But when they arrive, Charlotte is immediately drawn into a new case: a series of accidents have been befalling the members of the community theater troupe in Oxford, and now, on the eve of their production of Hamlet, they’re starting all over again. What once seemed like a comedy of errors is now a race to prevent the next tragedy—before Charlotte or Jamie is the next victim.

Anyone who has been in my orbit in the last three years knows how much I adore the Charlotte Holmes series. So I was prepared to love this final entry in the series without reservation, but I didn’t expect how much Charlotte’s hard-fought journey would resonate with me as a reader, and how wonderful it would be to see Charlotte, so often the star in someone else’s starry-eyed dream, take the lead and tell her own story. She’s a long way from the rough-edged, vibrant, damaged girl of the first book, and yet she’s not. Seeing her grow and change and start to understand how she can love and need someone and yet need to be apart from them…it was heartbreaking in the best way. I worried that Jamie would be less endearing when so little of the story was from his point of view, but no risk of that; no one appreciates Jamie like our Charlotte. How could such a series with such a heroine come to a fitting conclusion? Cavallaro gives us an answer that is the perfect mix of heartwarming, hilarious, moving, and deeply, viscerally satisfying.

A QUESTION OF HOLMES is out now.

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Read This!: THE CASE FOR JAMIE by Brittany Cavallaro

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The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)The Case for Jamie by Brittany Cavallaro

Summary: It’s been a year since the shocking death of August Moriarty, and Jamie and Charlotte haven’t spoken. Jamie is going through the motions at Sherringford, trying to finish his senior year without incident, with a nice girlfriend he can’t seem to fall for. Until strange things start happening to him. Strange things that might mean nothing at all—or that someone is after him again. Charlotte is on the run, from Lucien Moriarty, and from her own mistakes. No one has seen her since that fateful night on the lawn in Sussex. Charlotte wants it that way. She knows she isn’t safe to be around. She knows that her Watson can’t forgive her. Holmes and Watson may not be looking to reconcile, but there is someone who wants the team back together. Someone who has been quietly observing them both. Making plans. Biding their time. Someone who wants to see one of them suffer and the other one dead. Holmes and Watson face the ultimate test: they must unravel the case of their lives without unraveling each other.

Given how much I absolutely adored the first two books in this series, it will come as a surprise to no one that I savored this third installment twice, just basking in its awesomeness, before I could bring myself to review it. I was afraid, in the beginning, that this would be an anxiety-inducing book, because the idea of Jamie and Charlotte being apart was difficult for me. But Cavallaro is such a masterful storyteller that even when they are apart, we see, in chapters alternating Jamie and Charlotte’s points of view, how much they are still entwined in each other’s lives, and how they are being irrevocably drawn back together. And when their paths do collide again, at exactly the right time and place, and in the most Holmes-and-Watson way possible, well, it’s just magic. Jamie and Charlotte occupy an important place in my heart, of course, but Cavallaro made me fall in love with so many other characters too, even when I was resisting like mad. (Especially Elizabeth, the girl Jamie dates when he’s trying to get over Charlotte. There is no earthly way I should like Elizabeth, and yet, she won me over in a few pages.) With gripping action, realistic relationships, and characters that are funny, flawed, and real, this book does not disappoint. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to read it again.

THE CASE FOR JAMIE is out now.

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Read This!: THE LAST OF AUGUST by Brittany Cavallaro

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The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)The Last of August by Brittany Cavallaro

Summary: Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes are looking for a winter break reprieve in Sussex after a fall semester that almost got them killed. But nothing about their time off is proving simple, including Holmes and Watson’s growing feelings for each other. When Charlotte’s beloved uncle Leander goes missing from the Holmes estate—after being oddly private about his latest assignment in a German art forgery ring—the game is afoot once again, and Charlotte throws herself into a search for answers.  So begins a dangerous race through the gritty underground scene in Berlin and glittering art houses in Prague, where Holmes and Watson discover that this complicated case might change everything they know about their families, themselves, and each other.

I was lucky enough to read an early version of this book. And I guess it says a great deal about how much I LOVE this book and this series that I had already read it 5 times before its release date. I can’t pretend to be anything like objective when it comes to Jamie Watson and Charlotte Holmes. I love their relationship, with all its complications and twists and turns. I love how every character in this book is painted in vivid color. I love the voices of the characters – oh, man, the voices – Jamie’s wry, smart, adrenaline-fueled narration, and the fact that we get several chapters of Charlotte’s cool, precise voice at the helm (because Jamie is basically unconscious for that period, naturally). I want these books to be blankets, so I can build myself a fort out of them and never emerge.

THE LAST OF AUGUST is out now.

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Read This!: A STUDY IN CHARLOTTE by Brittany Cavallaro

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A Study in Charlotte (Charlotte Holmes, #1)A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro

Summary:  The last thing sixteen-year-old Jamie Watson–writer and great-great-grandson of the John Watson–wants is a rugby scholarship to Sherringford, a Connecticut prep school just an hour away from his estranged father. But that’s not the only complication: Sherringford is also home to Charlotte Holmes, the famous detective’s enigmatic, fiercely independent great-great-granddaughter, who’s inherited not just his genius but also his vices, volatile temperament, and expertly hidden vulnerability. Charlotte has been the object of his fascination for as long as he can remember–but from the moment they meet, there’s a tense energy between them, and they seem more destined to be rivals than anything else.  Then a Sherringford student dies under suspicious circumstances ripped straight from the most terrifying of the Holmes stories, and Jamie and Charlotte become the prime suspects. Convinced they’re being framed, they must race against the police to conduct their own investigation. As danger mounts, it becomes clear that nowhere is safe and the only people they can trust are each other.

 

This is going to sound hyperbolic, but 5 stars aren’t really enough to explain how much I loved this book. I’ve never been a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes – I mean, he was okay and all – but this book just grabbed me and held me spellbound all the way through.

Before I opened this book, all I knew about it was that it was about Holmes and Watson’s great-great-something-grandchildren, and I assumed that it would be something like “Young Sherlock Holmes” where a pair of lads at a boarding school solve a mystery while rescuing an intriguing girl named Charlotte. (Guess that says something about what previous Sherlock Holmes adaptations have taught me to expect…)

This book is not anything like that. No swooning heroines here.

The first thing you need to know about A STUDY IN CHARLOTTE is that, in the world of the book, Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were 100% real. (Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson’s literary agent.) Now, with the aid of some well-meaning family meddling, their descendants Charlotte Holmes and Jamie Watson are students at the same Connecticut boarding school. And where a Holmes and Watson go, mystery is sure to follow.

Moody and mercurial are defining Holmes characteristics – HOW has the great detective not been reimagined before as a teenage girl? It’s beyond right. The characters here are fantastic – I want to hang out with them the way I want to hang out with Harry, Ron, and Hermione. Charlotte is brilliant, flawed, and utterly, agonizingly human, and Jamie is a wry, appealing, gold-hearted narrator (who, by the way, is also no slouch in the brains department). Together they are incandescent. Sure, there is sexual tension, but it’s so, so much more than that. One of my favorite quotes:
“I wanted the two of us to be complicated together, to be difficult and engrossing and blindingly brilliant. Sex was a commonplace kind of complicated. And nothing about Charlotte Holmes was commonplace.”

Just read it. You won’t regret it.

A STUDY IN CHARLOTTE is out now.
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