The hotly anticipated and explosive third book in the New York Times bestselling Charlotte Holmes series.
It’s been a year since the shocking death of August Moriarty, and Jamie and Charlotte haven’t spoken.
Jamie is going through the motions at Sherringford, trying to finish his senior year without incident, with a nice girlfriend he can’t seem to fall for.
Charlotte is on the run, from Lucien Moriarty and from her own mistakes. No one has seen her since that fateful night on the lawn in Sussex—and Charlotte wants it that way. She knows she isn’t safe to be around. She knows her Watson can’t forgive her.
Holmes and Watson may not be looking to reconcile, but when strange things start happening, it’s clear that someone wants the team back together. Someone who has been quietly observing them both. Making plans. Biding their time.
Someone who wants to see one of them suffer and the other one dead.
cw: panic attacks, PTSD, substance abuse, mentions of rape and murder, violence, parental abuse.
This is by far my favorite of the series, and I really enjoyed the last two. I love this series so much. Both Charlotte and Jamie have become huge favorites of mine.
"Holmes wasn't a myth, or a king. She was a person. And to have a relationship with a person, you had to treat them like one."
I loved the dual perspectives. In the last two books we are almost exclusively in only Jamie's point of view so to have Charlotte's perspective as well was incredibly needed. Sometimes multiple POV chapters do not work or at the least seem unnecessary but Cavallaro executed it perfectly. I loved getting to see more of Charlotte's past whole also getting into her head a bit more. It definitely helped the reader understand her better. Because we saw Charlotte almost completely through Jamie's eyes, someone who admires and often puts her on a pedestal, we didn't really get to know Charlotte because she held so much from Jamie. Reading her thoughts made it easier to see her as a teenage girl. Sure, a brilliant one, but she's human. She acts cold and robotic often, and because she's always multiple steps ahead of Jamie it's easy to forget that she's a teenage girl who is just trying her best with a lot of outside pressure. I think if I didn't love Charlotte before, I do now after reading The Case For Jamie.
Jamie is my favorite of the two. I have often kind of preferred the Watson (most editions, at least) characters over the Holmes characters. I always admired the Holmes characters, but I am not smart enough to actually relate to them the way I have related to the Watson characters. It's hard not to love Jamie. He may make not great decisions at times, but he genuinely just wants to do good and he's been through a lot for being so young. His loyalty to the ones he loves in admirable. However, this boy should not have been in a relationship. He just went through multiple life altering situations, some where he almost lost his life, which obviously were really traumatic for him. He didn't treat Elizabeth well, someone who had been affected by the events in the first book and was probably working through trauma of her own, and he certainly didn't treat his friends any better. Honestly, the only new person in his life needs to be a damn therapist.
"Just because you know something about yourself doesn't mean you should be forgiven for it."
I thought I was going to not enjoy this book as much as the others because I knew that Jamie and Charlotte were separated for the majority of this book prior to picking it up. An although sure, the moments of them together in The Case For Jamie are some of my favorites, I think the time apart did them both good and helped the reader get to know them more as individual characters. Like I said earlier, we got to know Charlotte on a more human level, something that I think needed to happen. Also, I want to point out how funny Jamie was in this book, but especially in the "Watson Wuz Here" scene.
My biggest criticism with the book is barely a criticism for me, which shows how much I loved this one, is, the first half of the book or so is much slower paced. Personally, I had no issue with it and loved every minute but I can see why some other readers maybe would have preferred a little more action. If I love the characters, I can read about them doing practically anything without any issues, so I was having a good time regardless. I was never bored and I do think that the plot never felt halted, it was always moving forward, just slower than some may have wanted. The writing, characters, and plot were all enjoyable for me so I was just happily along for the ride. Listening it to the audiobook could have also helped.
"I felt it. Felt everything. I knew I wanted to erase myself from the top down, like a drawing, and that still I wanted someone to touch my edges and tell me that they loved me despite them."
Overall, if you haven't read these books I cannot recommend them enough. I think that if you're a fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories, this series is really fun to read. And if you don't like them, or maybe haven't read them, this series stands alone in its own way that you could still really enjoy Charlotte and Jamie's story. I do have my reviews for the last two books linked above before the review starts. If you've read these books (up to this point, don't spoil the last one for me!) I'd love to talk. I already have the final book requested from the library so I am impatiently waiting for it as we speak and hope to get to it ASAP.
Thanks for reading!
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