A Study in Honor

A Study in Honor (2018) Claire O’Dell (The Janet Watson Chronicles)

Here’s the deal. I don’t like SF. I don’t like dystopias. But I love mysteries, and I’m a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, although I really dislike Sherlock Holmes stories that were NOT written by ACD. So this was not going to be an easy read for me, having so many elements I generally don’t enjoy.

Dr. Janet Watson was honorably discharged from the Army after losing her left arm. They gave her a mechanical appliance, but not only was it not good enough to continue her job as a surgeon–it wasn’t even the correct size for her, but was the best that could be done in the field.

I had worked too hard— and let’s be honest, I owed too much money— to throw away my career as a surgeon. So I had returned to DC, to the city where I had lived as a child and later as a student, to exact a more useful reward for my services to my country. I couldn’t hope for an entirely new device, not with the war and its needs outpacing the factories, but surely the VA might supply me with one better fitted to my body and my profession.

But no one in the US is happy with the Civil War raging in the midwest, and budgets have been cut for everyone, so Janet searches for a job and makes plans to badger the VA every month as is her legal right.

I had a very difficult time with the world building, not because it was badly done, but because it was well done, and dystopias make me very unhappy.

they had instituted this new system, where medical technicians interviewed the patients, took their blood pressure, and handled dozens of other tasks once assigned to the nurses and physician assistants. Our time was cheaper than theirs, and since we worked thirty or fewer hours a week, we cost the VA no benefits.

Although the characters are Janet Watson and Sara Holmes, and although Janet is a retired army doctor, this story is a Holmes & Watson story only in that it has some of the Holmes tropes, but is a completely different spin, which is one of the things I particularly enjoyed about it.

But, as I said, it was a SF dystopia, so as much as I enjoyed the mystery, and will probably read the next book at some point, the whole thing left me unsettled (which is why I dislike dystopias). So although not a series I could read one book after another, I do want to read the next book, to see what happen with the characters.

Publisher : Harper Voyager
Rating: 6.5/10

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