The Case of the Missing Marquess by Nancy Springer

January 20, 2008 · Filed under Adventure, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Older Fiction

I love a good mystery and a heroine with lots of gumption!  This book has both.  Enola is the much younger sister of Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective,  and his brother Mycroft.  On her fourteenth birthday, Enola’s mother does not return home.  The sons find that she has let the estate fall into ruin and has let her daughter run wild.  She has accumulated the money she has saved on expenses and used it to escape from the confining Victorian rules of etiquette and class which bind her to the estate and to a life she does not want. 

Mycroft decides to straighten Enola out immediately by sending her off to boarding school where she can trade in her knickerbockers for bustled and corseted decorum.  Enola decides that she has no other course than to run away and support herself until she comes of age. 

Enola does elude her brothers.  She is good at codes, disguises, deception and finding things.  In fact, she investigates the disappearance of the Duke of Tewkesbury’s son and passes on an important clue to the police.  

This could turn a lot of young readers into fans of the British mystery genre.  Recommended to girls in grades 5 through 8.

Posted by: Fran W.