Review: A Study in Honor, by Claire O'Dell

[Russ Allbery]

A Study in Honor
by Claire O'Dell

Series:    Janet Watson Chronicles #1
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Copyright: July 2018
ISBN:      0-06-269932-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     295

A Study in Honor is a near-future science fiction novel by Claire
O'Dell, a pen name for Beth Bernobich. You will see some assertions,
including by the Lambda Literary Award judges, that it is a mystery
novel. There is a mystery, but... well, more on that in a moment.

Janet Watson was an Army surgeon in the Second US Civil War when New
Confederacy troops overran the lines in Alton, Illinois. Watson lost
her left arm to enemy fire. As this book opens, she is returning to
Washington, D.C. with a medical discharge, PTSD, and a field
replacement artificial arm scavenged from another dead soldier. It
works, sort of, mostly, despite being mismatched to her arm and old in
both technology and previous wear. It does not work well enough for her
to resume her career as a surgeon.

Watson's plan is to request a better artificial arm from the VA (the
United States Department of Veterans Affairs, which among other things
is responsible for the medical care of wounded veterans). That plan
meets a wall of unyielding and uninterested bureaucracy. She has a
pension, but it's barely enough for cheap lodging. A lifeline comes in
the form of a chance encounter with a former assistant in the Army, who
has a difficult friend looking to split the cost of an apartment. The
name of that friend is Sara Holmes.

At this point, you know what to expect. This is clearly one of the many
respinnings of Arthur Conan Doyle. This time, the setting is in the
future and Watson and Holmes are both black women, but the other
elements of the setup are familiar: the immediate deduction that Watson
came from the front, the shared rooms (2809 Q Street this time,
sacrificing homage for the accuracy of a real address), Holmes's
tendency to play an instrument (this time the piano), and even the
title of this book, which is an obvious echo of the title of the first
Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet.

Except that's not what you'll get. There are a lot of parallels and
references here, but this is not a Holmes-style detective novel.

First, it's only arguably a detective novel at all. There is a mystery,
which starts with a patient Watson sees in her fallback job as a
medical tech in the VA hospital and escalates to a physical attack, but
that doesn't start until a third of the way into the book. It certainly
is not solved through minute clues and leaps of deduction; instead,
that part of the plot has the shape of a thriller rather than a classic
mystery. There is a good argument that the thriller is the modern
mystery novel, so I don't want to overstate my case, but I think
someone who came to this book wanting a Doyle-style mystery would be
disappointed.

Second, the mystery is not the heart of this book. Watson is. She, like
Doyle's Watson, is the first-person narrator, but she is far more
present in the book. I have no idea how accurate O'Dell's portrayal of
Watson's PTSD is, but it was certainly compelling and engrossing
reading. Her fight for basic dignity and her rage at the surface
respect and underlying disinterested hostility of the bureaucratic war
machinery is what kept me turning the pages. The mystery plot is an
outgrowth of that and felt more like a case study than the motivating
thread of the plot.

And third, Sara Holmes... well, I hesitate to say definitively that
she's not Sherlock Holmes. There have been so many versions of Holmes
over the years, even apart from the degree to which a black woman would
necessarily not be like Doyle's character. But she did not remind me of
Sherlock Holmes. She reminded me of a cross between James Bond and a
high fae.

This sounds like a criticism. It very much is not. I found this high
elf spy character far more interesting than I have ever found Sherlock
Holmes. But here again, if you came into this book hoping for a
Holmes-style master detective, I fear you may be wrong-footed.

The James Bond parts will be obvious when you get there and aren't the
most interesting (and thankfully the misogyny is entirely absent). The
part I found more fascinating is the way O'Dell sets Holmes apart by
making her fae rather than insufferable. She projects effortless
elegance, appears and disappears on a mysterious schedule of her own,
thinks nothing of reading her roommate's diary, leaves meticulously
arranged gifts, and even bargains with Watson for answers to precisely
three questions. The reader does learn some mundane explanations for
some of this behavior, but to be honest I found them somewhat of a
letdown. Sara Holmes is at her best as a character when she tacks her
own mysterious path through a rather grim world of exhausted war,
penny-pinching bureaucracy, and despair, pursuing an unexplained agenda
of her own while showing odd but unmistakable signs of friendship and
care.

This is not a romance, at least in this book. It is instead a
slowly-developing friendship between two extremely different people,
one that I thoroughly enjoyed.

I do have a couple of caveats about this book. The first is that the
future US in which it is set is almost pure Twitter doomcasting.
Trump's election sparked a long slide into fascism, and when that was
arrested by the election of a progressive candidate backed by a fragile
coalition, Midwestern red states seceded to form the New Confederacy
and start a second civil war that has dragged on for nearly eight
years. It's a very specific mainstream liberal dystopian scenario that
I've seen so many times it felt like a cliche even though I don't
remember seeing it in a book before. This type of future projection of
current fears is of course not new for science fiction; the number of
Cold War nuclear war novels is probably innumerable. But I had
questions, such as how a sparsely-populated, largely non-industrial,
and entirely landlocked set of breakaway states could maintain a war
footing for eight years. Despite some hand-waving about covert support,
those questions are not really answered here.

The second problem is that the ending of this book kind of falls apart.
The climax of the mystery investigation is unsatisfyingly
straightforward, and the resulting revelation is a hoary cliche. Maybe
I'm just complaining about the banality of evil, but if I'd been
engrossed in this book for the thriller plot, I think I would have been
annoyed.

I wasn't, though; I was here for the characters, for Watson's PTSD and
dogged determination, for Sara's strangeness, and particularly for the
growing improbable friendship between two women with extremely
different life experiences, emotions, and outlooks. That part was
great, regardless of the ending.

Do not pick this book up because you want a satisfying deductive
mystery with bumbling police and a blizzard of apparently
inconsequential clues. That is not at all what's happening here. But
this was great on its own terms, and I will be reading the sequel
shortly. Recommended, although if you are very online expect to do a
bit of eye-rolling at the setting.

Followed by The Hound of Justice.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2023-12-25

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-269932-6.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>