A review by celichoc
Mrs. Sherlock Holmes by Brad Ricca

3.0

My read for #womenshistorymonth 2020. Ricca tells the story of Grace Humiston, one of America’s first female lawyers and the first female detective in New York City. The book covers Humiston’s career from beginning to end. She took night classes at NYU law school, started her own law practice for the needy, and solved a notorious missing person case before her detective career’s disappointing end (read the book for more on that). The book read similar to Erik Larson’s Devil in the White City, but without the chapters expounding on the bureaucracy of architecture. It still got a little dry in places, but it was easy to push through those to the sections on Humiston’s investigations. In all, the book paints a heartbreaking picture of the magnitudes it took for a female professional to gain the public’s admiration in the early 1900s and how depressingly little it took to lose it.