This was great! Myrtle was such an intelligent girl and I loved the fact that the adults in her life supported her and were a significant part of the story. The crime in this story was surprisingly complex and kept me guessing until the end. I was hooked by this story early on and found it almost impossible to set aside. Where were middle-grade books like this when I was younger?

12-year-old Myrtle is a fantastic character. She is more intelligent than most of the adults in the story and is always looking into something and constantly making observations. When a neighbor dies, Myrtle decides that she needs to look into it and she will stop at nothing to get to the bottom of things. The Victorian setting was incredibly well done and only added to the story’s charm.

I listened to the audiobook and thought that the narrator did a fantastic job of bringing this story to life. Bethan Rose Young did such a great job of representing this fun cast of characters. I found her voice to be very pleasant and didn’t want to stop listening. I cannot wait to read the next book in this fun middle-grade series!

I received a review copy of this book from Algonquin Young Readers. ( )

Twelve-year-old Myrtle Hardcastle has a passion for justice and a Highly Unconventional obsession with criminal science. Armed with her father’s law books and her mum’s microscope, Myrtle studies toxicology, keeps abreast of the latest developments in crime scene analysis, and Observes her neighbors in the quiet village of Swinburne, England.
When her next-door neighbor, a wealthy spinster and eccentric breeder of rare flowers, dies under Mysterious Circumstances, Myrtle seizes her chance. With her unflappable governess, Miss Ada Judson, by her side, Myrtle takes it upon herself to prove Miss Wodehouse was murdered and find the killer, even if nobody else believes he —not even her father, the town prosecutor. ( )

I LOVED this book. I loved the main character Myrtle and her relationship with her governess, Miss Judson. I loved reading about crime and detective work in Victorian England, and spunky Myrtle and her drive to solve the murder of her neighbor. The writing was great and the mystery was intriguing. It had me guessing who the culprit was until the end. I highly recommend this book if you like mysteries! ( )

Fans of Enola Holmes and Flavia de Luce will probably enjoy this story. It's written at a middle-grade level, but it's not bad for an adult reader. The governess, Miss Judson, is surprising and more than competent as Myrtle's companion/supervisor in this murder mystery. ( )

We expect a good detective to have many skills that the rest of us don't have. Myrtle Hardcastle has the amazing skill of living in 1893 England but being a twenty-first century American pre-teen.

I like mysteries with female protagonists. When I chanced across this one, and saw that it was written by a female author, and that it had won an Edgar award, I was intrigued.

What I got was what feels like a Flavia de Luce knock-off, which claims to be set sixty years earlier but... isn't. Within ten pages, it seemed so obviously, utterly, blatantly obvious that this was a book by an American that I checked, and yes, Elizabeth Bunce is from Virginia and lives in Kansas City. The book doesn't (quite) contain references to the Internet or to Harry Potter, but the language is so un-British and so modern that it was a constant, endless nag. It's like someone wrote a 2013 mystery and then went through and changed all the street signs and turned the automobiles into bicycles -- but did nothing else.

Nor does Bunce seem to have any sense for the Colonialist feelings that permeated nineteenth century Britain. That is most frequently obvious in the language, but that's not the only place. The daughter of a widowed middle-class gentleman (I told you it sounds like a Flavia de Luce knock-off -- although Myrtle Hardcastle, apart from her obsession with being a detective, has none of Flavia's endearing, autism-like traits) does not have a half-Carib governess, and the town doctor does not sound as if he came from India. Should those things have been possible? Sure. But they weren't.

And the cap Myrtle so wanted? According to the references I've seen, the Conan Doyle books nowhere refer to Sherlock Holmes wearing a deerstalker cap. That first appeared in one of Sidney Paget's illustrations in "The Boscombe Valley Mystery," in the October 1891 Strand Magazine. It wasn't "the Holmes headgear" in 1893!

If you don't mind an incredible amount of anachronism, Myrtle is a fairly fun character, although a good detective would learn not to blurt things out all the time! The mystery itself... is overly complex, and I do not believe it is possible for the reader to determine whodunit before the actual explanation. There are also some scientific loose ends. This is a decent detective story but not a great mystery.

Am I tempted to get the next book? Yes; I really do like female detectives, and while I still prefer Flavia, she isn't being written any more, and obviously it's better to have a woman write a girl's story than a man. And yet, every time I'd start getting interested, there would be another anachronism to jolt me. It's like getting hit with a cattle prod every time I settle down. If you don't care about history or verisimilitude, that may not be an issue. Me, I still haven't decided whether to read book two. ( )