KARADIN

I picked up the first of this series by Nancy Springer due to good reviews and it's great fun. The prose style is a perfect match between a modern novel in its pacing and the Holmes canon for it's particular word choices. While stories give nods to Holmes canon (that long time fans might spy) the mysteries are NEW, not pastiches of previous work.

What I like about these books, the main character Enola, younger sister of Mycroft and Sherlock is always her own person, and while she's inherited the brilliant mind of a Holmes, she's still only fourteen, and along with that comes some personal insecurities - not least that her mother abandons her, and while she adores her older brother Sherlock, (whom she's only met twice as a young girl) she doesn't know him as a person, and is torn between trusting him and fearing him.

She does know that she won't be sent away to boarding school and be molded into Victorian ideals of what a genteel young woman should be, so she strikes out on her own to a)discover what has happened to her mother and b) discover how she can use her talents to become the independent woman she wants to be.

And its all quite plausible, the mysteries, the way Enola solves them (not without taking wrong turns - she never acquires superpowers) the tone and content of the books never preach as they give excellent period detail of what Victorian life in London at the time was, from the lives of the gentry, down to the poorest wretches of the slums. Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and Mycroft Holmes all appear in perfect character, which won't disappoint canon fans (the writer is herself a fan)

Enola never reads as a dreaded Mary Sue, I admire her desire to not disguise herself as a boy (not only because that is what Sherlock and Mycroft expect) but to be both a woman and a detective, she takes both misery and pride in that her name spelled backwards means 'Alone'

So give these books a try, you won't regret it.
(aside, I'm not a Mary Russell fan - these are better.)