Title: Mrs. Sherlock Holmes: The True Story of New York City's Greatest Female Detective and the 1917 Missing Girl Case That Captivated a Nation
Author: Brad Ricca
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press 2017
Genre: Nonfiction - True Crime
Pages: 448
Rating: 2/5 stars
Reading Challenges: Nonfiction Reader; Library Love
Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the true story of Mrs. Grace Humiston, the detective and lawyer who turned her back on New York society life to become one of the nation's greatest crime fighters during an era when women weren't even allowed to vote. After graduating from N.Y.U. law school, Grace opened a legal clinic in the city for low-income immigrant clients, and quickly established a reputation as a fierce, but fair lawyer who was always on the side of the disenfranchised.
Grace's motto "Justice for those of limited means" led her to strange cases all over the city, and eventually the world. From defending an innocent giant on death row to investigating an island in Arkansas with a terrible secret about slavery; from the warring halls of Congress to a crumbling medieval tower in Italy, Grace solved crimes in-between shopping at Bergdorf Goodman and being marked for death by the sinister Black Hand. She defended women clients who had killed their attackers and fought the framing of a Baltimore black man at the mercy of a corrupt police department. Known for dressing only in black, Grace was appointed the first woman U.S. district attorney in history. And when a pretty 18-year-old girl named Ruth Cruger went missing on Valentine's Day in New York, Grace took the case after the police gave up. Grace and her partner, the hard-boiled Hungarian detective Julius J. Kron, navigated a dangerous mystery of secret boyfriends, two-faced cops, underground tunnels, rumors of white slavery, and a mysterious pale man -- in a desperate race against time to save Ruth. When she solved the crime, she was made the first female consulting detective to the NYPD.
But despite her many successes in social and criminal justice, Grace began to see chilling connections in the cases she had solved, leading to a final showdown with her most fearsome adversary of all and one of the most powerful men of the twentieth century.
This is the first-ever literary biography of the singular woman the press nicknamed after fiction's greatest detective. In the narrative tradition of In Cold Blood and The Devil in the White City, her poignant story unmasks unmistakable connections between missing girls, the role of the media, and the real truth of crime stories. The great mystery of Mrs. Sherlock Holmes -- and its haunting twist ending -- is how one woman dedicated to finding the missing herself become so lost to history?
This was one giant dud of a book! I was hoping for an examination of how one of the first women detectives in the United States proved her qualifications and solved crimes. Instead, I got a jumble of book more intent on telling all the tiny irrelevant details of one particular case while alluding to others but not exploring them. We get a ton of inside information about the thoughts and feelings of a variety of people related to the missing woman’s case, but nothing from Grace. We meander around the case while dropping weird hints and observations. But we don’t really get to the point. We don’t get to place Grace in the time and geographic location. This is certainly no Erik Larson style book that connects the dots so that the audience can understanding why the story is truly groundbreaking. I wonder if this was an article and the author was pressured into padding it out to a full length book? That might explain the complete necessary information and side tangents that take up a majority of the pages.
Next up on the TBR pile:
