Review: The Hound of Justice, by Claire O'Dell

[Russ Allbery]

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

Reviewed: 2023-12-29

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-06-269938-5.html

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