Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche

Thank you to Wednesday Books for gifting me a review copy of Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche by Nancy Springer.

I’m going to be honest and tell you that the first I heard about Enola Holmes was because someone recommended I watch the movie starring Millie Bobby Brown (from Stranger Things). Well, the movie certainly got me hooked on the spunky, too-smart-for-her-own-good younger sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes and all of the adventure (or maybe misadventure) she gets up to. As soon as I realized the movie was based on a series of books…and really, what good movie isn’t…I knew I had to read them all.

Enola Holmes and the Black barouche is number seven in the series. In this chapter of her story Enola is now 15, and fancies herself quite grown-up, much to her brothers’ dismay. She’s basically living in London, solving mysteries, when Letitia Glover shows up asking for help in discovering what happened to her twin sister. They had received a note from her husband saying that she died, but Letitia doesn’t believe it and is desperate to learn the truth. There’s nothing for it but to investigate, so off Enola goes to uncover the truth.

Enola is such a headstrong and delightful character, I really can’t get enough of her. I’m not-so-secretly hoping that every one of these books is made into a movie because these stories really do leap off the page.

If you haven’t started this series yet, there’s no time like the present—dive in, Enola would!

Synopsis:

Enola Holmes is the much younger sister of her more famous brothers, Sherlock and Mycroft. But she has all the wits, skills, and sleuthing inclinations of them both. At fifteen, she's an independent young woman--after all, her name spelled backwards reads 'alone'--and living on her own in London. When a young professional woman, Miss Letitia Glover, shows up on Sherlock's doorstep, desperate to learn more about the fate of her twin sister, it is Enola who steps up. It seems her sister, the former Felicity Glover, married the Earl of Dunhench and per a curt note from the Earl, has died. But Letitia Glover is convinced this isn't the truth, that she'd know--she'd feel--if her twin had died.

The Earl's note is suspiciously vague and the death certificate is even more dubious, signed it seems by a John H. Watson, M.D. (who denies any knowledge of such). The only way forward is for Enola to go undercover--or so Enola decides at the vehement objection of her brother. And she soon finds out that this is not the first of the Earl's wives to die suddenly and vaguely--and that the secret to the fate of the missing Felicity is tied to a mysterious black barouche that arrived at the Earl's home in the middle of the night. To uncover the secrets held tightly within the Earl's hall, Enola is going to require help--from Sherlock, from the twin sister of the missing woman, and from an old friend, the young Viscount Tewkesbury, Marquess of Basilwether!