A fascinating tale about someone I had never heard of. I would have liked a tidier ending, but such is nonfiction and real life. Carefully researched, engagingly written.

Unsatisfying, but that's not really Ricca's fault. It disappoints and pains me that Grace lost her stuff and made mistakes that essentially ended her career, but she did accomplish many great things, and I'm glad to know about her.

Fascinating! First of all, the name Sherlock Holmes caught my attention for this book. I may or may not be obsessed with Sherlock Holmes. But the topic of the book sealed the deal. I had to read it.
This is the real story of Grace (Quackenbos) Humiston, a female lawyer and detective in the early 1900's. She earned her law degree at NYU because they were the only school, at the time, who would allow women to study law. She not only had a good mind for law but she had a keen eye for observing and seeing what others didn't. This skill led her to detective work. She worked for both federal and state governments during her career and assisted thousands of immigrants with legal matters. A opponent of the death penalty she was able to overturn several executions at the eleventh hour by finding new evidence in places nobody else had thought to look. She was also a warrior against white slavery (as it was called then), now known as human trafficking. In 1917 her career led her to a case of a missing teenager in New York City. Ruth Cruger had been missing for weeks when her father, Henry Cruger, finally pleaded with Grace to take the case - the police and their detectives, as well as some other private detectives, had been unable to find Ruth and had almost given up on her as a runaway. Her family and friends knew that was not true, Ruth would never do that. Grace took the case and ended up solving it, helping the Cruger family be able to have closure with Ruth's disappearance. Her career bottomed out as she investigated other situations in which she insisted criminal activity was occurring but couldn't get the support she needed to do complete investigations. Throughout her lifetime Grace was a champion for justice and a defender of the needy.
I really enjoyed this telling of Grace Humiston and her contributions to law, investigations, and immigration law and reform. I like how Ricca told Grace's backstory leading up to her becoming involved in the 1917 Cruger case, it provides the reader with important information about Grace's knowledge and experience with law and investigating. What I also liked about the book was Ricca's writing style - not dry and academic but very storytelling and engaging.

So painful. I did finish the book, but about 1/2 way through I started skimming through the superfluous information.

"Mrs. Sherlock Holmes tells the incredible true life story of Mrs. Grace Humiston, the New York lawyer and detective who solved the famous cold case of Ruth Cruger, an 18-year-old girl who disappeared in 1917. Grace was an amazing lawyer and traveling detective during a time when no women were practicing these professions. She focused on solving cases no one else wanted and advocating for innocents. Grace became the first female U.S. District Attorney and made ground-breaking investigations into modern slavery. One of Grace's greatest accomplishments was solving the Cruger case after following a trail of corruption that lead from New York to Italy. Her work changed how the country viewed the problem of missing girls. But the victory came with a price when she learned all too well what happens when one woman upstages the entire NYPD."

The woman in black//
Lawyer, gumshoe, advocate//
Unrelenting will

This biography of Grace Humiston's work and related cases is fascinating, but weighed down by detailed, rambling storytelling. Grace was notable not only for her work on behalf of immigrants and fighting violence against women and children, but for being a pioneering woman in her fields (lawyer, detective). It's disheartening to see the same discriminations and crimes we fight today. Some of the quotes made me shake my head in anger, exasperation or shame. We have not come nearly far enough.

It started off telling insightful stories but there were so many side stories that detracted from the story of Grace. The book began with a story about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle but it was over 3/4 of the way through the book where Grace refers to the moniker and denies she is anything of the sort. And given that Doyle had no bearing on any of her cases, the reference feels like a PR angle for the book.

As the book continued, the stories of character seemed to switch to a recounting of facts. There are moments where the author says she disappeared while spurious claims were being made only to appear as a letter rejecting these claims. More frustrating, the claims were never investigated by the book. Was there or was there not 600 girls kidnapped at the Long Island military base? Where did Grace get that number? Why go into such depth over something that may or may not be true?

I really wanted to like this book more.

I truly disliked this book. There was so much good potential, but it read like index cards compiled after many trips to the library. Dull writing, weak organization, confusing storytelling, all burying what seems like a potentially fascinating story about a woman who did great work for people who really needed it. She deserved better. The Sherlock Holmes comparison is goofy too -- Sherlock Holmes stories are about a master of deductive reasoning. The subject of this book was more of a crusader for justice. Shoehorning her into a collection of "mysteries" was a poor way to get her story across.

Whew. This was a slog to get through. If I didn't feel like I'd be cheating on my 50 books challenge, I'd have abandoned it days and days ago. But having slogged through the first 50 pages, I felt like I damn sure wanted to get credit for it.

So, yeah. The only thing that saved this AT ALL was the subject matter. Grace Humiston was a fascinating woman about whom I'd never heard anything. Her compulsion to find justice for immigrants, women, and African Americans makes hers an incredibly timely story, despite it being 100 years old.

But oh my goodness, the writing is bad. Bad on so, so many different levels. (I see on the back that the author has won numerous awards. How is this possible? The mind reels.) The information is presented in a haphazard fashion. On page 86, it says that "Martha dispelled the notion that Grace's recent divorce had anything to do with her leaving the city." Grace is the titular character of this book, and this is the first mention that she was ever married, much less divorced. I appreciate that the author isn't fixated on her marital status just because she's a woman, but this seems like rather important information to mention this late.

This is part of a larger problem with the book, which is that you're subjected to minute detail after minute detail, with never ever any attempt from the author to provide context or meaning. And you could draw your own meanings... except that by that point, you're so buried in trivialities that you no longer remember who these people are or why you should care.

And lastly, the writing itself is just oddly childlike. "The detective looked for Seymour Many, but he was busy all day at a sports contest at Madison Square Garden. He was captain of the track team." This reads like a book written for -- or maybe by -- 5th graders.

Such a shame, because it's a good story. But not a good book, not by a long shot.