Review:
The Hound of Justice, by Claire O'Dell
Series: |
Janet Watson Chronicles #2 |
Publisher: |
Harper Voyager |
Copyright: |
July 2019 |
ISBN: |
0-06-269938-5 |
Format: |
Kindle |
Pages: |
325 |
The Hound of Justice is a near-future thriller novel with Sherlock
Holmes references. It is a direct sequel to
A Study in Honor. This series is best read in order.
Janet Watson is in a much better place than she was in the first book.
She has proper physical therapy, a new arm, and a surgeon's job waiting
for her as soon as she can master its features. A chance meeting due to
an Inauguration Day terrorist attack may even develop into something more.
She just needs to get back into the operating room and then she'll feel
like her life is back on track.
Sara Holmes, on the other hand, is restless, bored, and manic, rudely
intruding on Watson's date. Then she disappears, upending Watson's living
arrangements. She's on the trail of something. When mysterious
destructible notes start appearing in Watson's books, it's clear that she
wants help.
The structure of this book didn't really work for me. The first third or
so is a slice-of-life account of Watson's attempt to resume her career as
a surgeon against a backdrop of ongoing depressing politics. This part
sounds like the least interesting, but I was thoroughly engrossed. Watson
is easy to care about, hospital politics are strangely interesting, and
while the romance never quite clicked for me, it had potential. I was
hoping for another book like
A Study in Honor, where Watson's life
and Holmes's investigations entwine and run in parallel.
That was not to be. The middle third of the book pulls Watson away to
Georgia and a complicated mix of family obligations and spy-novel
machinations. If this had involved Sara's fae strangeness, verbal
sparring, and odd tokens of appreciation, maybe it would have worked, but
Sara Holmes is entirely off-camera. Watson is instead dealing with a
minor supporting character from the first book, who drags her through
disguises, vehicle changes, and border stops in a way that felt excessive
and weirdly out of place. (Other reviews say that this character is the
Mycroft Holmes equivalent; the first initial of Micha's name fits, but
nothing else does so far as I can tell.)
Then the last third of the novel turns into a heist.
I like a heist novel as much as the next person, but a good heist story
needs a team with chemistry and interplay, and I didn't know any of these
people. There was way too little Sara Holmes, too much of Watson being
out of her element in a rather generic way, and too many steps that Watson
is led through without giving the reader a chance to enjoy the competence
of the team. It felt jarring and disconnected, like Watson got pulled out
of one story and dropped into an entirely different story without a proper
groundwork.
The Hound of Justice still has its moments. Watson is a great
character and I'm still fully invested in her life. She was pulled into
this mission because she's the person Holmes knows with the appropriate
skills, and when she finally gets a chance to put those skills to use,
it's quite satisfying.
But, alas, the magic of
A Study in Honor simply isn't here, in part
because Sara Holmes is missing for most of the book and her replacements
and stand-ins are nowhere near as intriguing. The villain's plan seems
wildly impractical and highly likely to be detected, and although I can
come up with some explanations to salvage it, those don't appear in the
book. And, as in the first book, the villain seems very one-dimensional
and simplistic. This is certainly not a villain worthy of Holmes.
Fittingly, given the political movements O'Dell is commenting on, a lot of
this book is about racial politics. O'Dell contrasts the microaggressions
and more subtle dangers for Watson as a black woman in Washington, D.C.,
with the more explicit and active racism of the other places to which she
travels over the course of the story. She's trying very hard to give the
reader a feeling for what it's like to be black in the United States. I
don't have any specific complaints about this, and I'm glad she's
attempting it, but I came away from this book with a nagging feeling that
Watson's reactions were a tiny bit off. It felt like a white person
writing about racism rather than a black person writing about racism:
nothing is entirely incorrect, but the emotional beats aren't quite where
black authors would put them. I could be completely wrong about this, and
am certainly much less qualified to comment than O'Dell is, but there were
enough places that landed slightly wrong that I wanted to note it.
I would still recommend
A Study in Honor, but I'm not sure I can
recommend this book. This is one of those series where the things that I
enjoyed the most about the first book weren't what the author wanted to
focus on in subsequent books. I would read more about the day-to-day of
Watson's life, and I would certainly read more of Holmes and Watson
sparring and circling and trying to understand each other. I'm less
interested in somewhat generic thrillers with implausible plots and
Sherlock Holmes references.
At the moment, this is academic, since
The Hound of Justice is the
last book of the series so far.
Rating: 6 out of 10