I am in LOVE with Ash! So, I decided to reread the whole series in order to read this one (I felt a bit lost) and I don’t regret that time commitment. I’ve already started the next in the series. Love Charlotte and the whole gang. I’ll read them all.

I received this book as part of a conference give away for all conference attendees. I love this series. Charlotte is such an unexpected twist on Sherlock Holmes. The books are in part cozy mystery, a little bit romance and a lot historical. My regular review channels are for YA and middle grade, making it hard for me to put this one up on my social channels, but I did do an Amazon review, where I gave it 5 stars under the name Tiffany Grinstead:

Another wonderful, magical story that merges mystery, historical fiction and a splash of romance. As Charlotte solves yet another mystery, intrigue builds in a greater plot that will carry through the books. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves historical romance, but wants instead historical cozy mystery. Brilliant!

The Lady Sherlock series is one of my favorite historical mystery series of all time. I constantly recommend it to anyone looking for a good mystery. I'm placing this on my book club list and purchasing one for the library. I really enjoy all the characters and the historical mystery with the added bits of romance.

This is the fifth novel in the Lady Sherlock Holmes series. I found Charlotte to be a very clever character. Many of the people she investigated all had secrets, and it took a long time for the real truth to unravel. I also like that her client also had secrets he tried to keep concealed. Thus, the mystery was well-done. I also like the character of Mrs. Watson, and her role she played in the investigation. Thus, the characters have grown in their sleuthing skills from the first novel. The only thing I did not like about the mystery was there were a few scenes that were drawn out and could have been eliminated. Still, this is a beautiful installment of a fantastic series, and I love the romance between Charlotte and Lord Ingram. Their relationship has been a slow burn that will appeal to romance readers! The Lady Sherlock series is a feminist take on Sherlock Holmes! I recommend this for fans of Jennifer Ashley, Andrea Penrose, and Ashley Gardner!

After the last Lady Sherlock book flipped the script on us and was more of a heist novel than a mystery, this book is a pleasant return to form. Holmes’ somewhat ally, Inspector Treadles, has been pretty convincingly charged with murder from within a locked room, and “Sherlock” and crew much prove his innocence despite Treadles’ mysterious refusal to contribute to the investigation. I enjoyed seeing so much more of Mrs. Treadles, and the return to a more classic mystery setup, though there was a LOT of discussion of timelines and who was where precisely when. A pleasant read overall!

Sherry Thomas is by far one of my favorite new authors! The way in which she writes Lady Charlotte Holmes and all the supporting characters leaves you cheering them on and wishing for more! I'm very grateful that I received a copy of Murder of Cold Street. I think others will enjoy it as well. A word of caution, this is NOT a stand alone book. You will need to have read the previous books in the series to understand much of what is going on. This time Charlotte is on the case of Inspector Treadles who has been accused of murder! I enjoy Inspector Treadles and was glad to see so much more of him in this installment. Guaranteed a good read!

I am sorry to be writing this review, but I did not enjoy this book at all. In fact, I did not finish it. I absolutely love mysteries and historical fiction so, theoretically, this book would be wonderful for me but I found it to be boring, slow paced, and characters were obnoxious.

I continue to love all the characters in this series. This book gave more insight and history of Treadles and his wife, along with a bit more exposure of the male-dominated society in which all find themselves. This setting gives a different perspective on both the victims and the accused. Charlotte continues to be a favorite of mine, in all ways.

I read quite a few historical cozy mysteries. It’s my comfort genre when the world gets turbulent and I need to see bad guys being brought to justice by ordinary people (women. In the books I read it is always women).

Here is why I think Sherry Thomas is the best at this.

1. She allows the reader to spend books getting to know her characters. Murder on Cold Street is book 5 in the Lady Sherlock series and I am still only getting to know the core cast of characters. Thomas holds her card close and you only get to know something when you need to know it. Because of this, each book is exciting! I get to learn something about people I love that I didn’t know before!
2. She is the queen of the slow burn romance. At book 5 in other series, I am so impatient for the romantic couple to get together, but Thomas has the perfect balance of tension - of give and take - that a shared smile has the same dopamine hit as an HEA.
3. The writing is sharp and smart, but also so beautiful. Thomas’s research is thorough and she reaches into history to include voices that the text books forgot.
4. This woman made me sigh over hot water bottle cozies so, clearly, she’s the best and I bow down to her genius.

Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk/Sherry Thomas love letter! I’m now going to go pretend that I still read other authors while I wait for November and book 6.

SherryThomas's writing is so lyrical and lush. I adore her Lady Sherlock series, and trying to unravel the mystery as Charlotte does always leaves me marveling at how much work must go into setting up a proper mystery so that not only is the reader kept in suspense but the reader is also satisfied that it all makes sense in the end. Sherry Thomas is a master class in doing that!

Normally, at this point in a series (Murder on Cold Street is the fifth in the Lady Sherlock series) I start to lose interest or forget all of the events of the previous books. The dynamics between characters can become stale, or fail to evolve, and the excitement wanes. However, not so with this novel, an adventure that takes the intrepid Charlotte Holmes to a new part of London, where mysterious murders in the form of a locked-door mystery present themselves.

The end of the last book, The Art of Theft, left readers on a cliff-hanger. Inspector Treadles, an ally to the Holmes gang and a friend of Lord Ingram, has been accused of murder. His wife, Alice, is convinced of his innocence, and engages Holmes and her associates to discover the truth of the matter. It is fortunate that Charlotte is on the case, as the evidence is pretty damning: Treadles was found in a locked room, with two dead men, holding a gun and covered in blood. It actually gets worse: the two dead men are associated with Alice, one is her late father’s business partner, and the other works for her at her company, Cousins Manufacturing. Matters look pretty bleak, to put it frankly. Despite that, the gang begins their task, endeavoring to uncover the truth and save the inspector from the hangman’s noose by Christmas.

I am already a big fan of the series, but I was incredibly impressed by this latest book. It advances the relationships between a number of characters, although most satisfyingly that of Charlotte and Lord Ingram. Thomas always has incredibly strong secondary characters, and I hope some of the ones who appear in Cold Street will return. The mystery itself is intricate, interwoven with details from previous books, which lends the story a curated quality that I really enjoyed. I love the little chosen family Charlotte has made for herself, and I am interested to see the developments the next book will bring. This series is easy to love, and I am content and pleased to see the books only improving with time.

With a solid mystery close to home and progress on the romantic front, this might be the best of the series.

I went into this book knowing I would love it. Sherry Thomas is an auto-buy author for me, particularly for this Lady Sherlock series. Charlotte Holmes is hands-down one of my most favorite book characters. She is so perfect as the female version of Sherlock, and her character only grows in ways that I LOVED in this book! I especially liked her continued interplay with Inspector Treadles, who has spent the last few books being very upset to discover that his beloved Holmes was in fact a **gasp** WOMAN. How dare (s)he! But in this book, we see him grappling and reckoning with this, and his views on women's liberation continue to grow and improve, which is directly beneficial to his own wife since she is attempting to run her family's business as a woman.

The murders and the investigation at the heart of this story were also really well-written. There were definitely more comings and goings into one house at night than one would ever dream possible, but it makes for a fun and twisty plot, as is standard for these books. I loved it!

I also really liked Miss Longstead, a new character introduced in this book--the niece of one of the murdered men. Her background is of mixed race, and it was nice to see more diversity added into this story. I just really liked her character and hope she'll be back in future books in this series.

Overall, this was a solid and enjoyable installment in the series, and I can't wait for more Lady Sherlock to come!

Blurb time!:

Charlotte Holmes, Lady Sherlock, investigates a puzzling new murder case that implicates Scotland Yard inspector Robert Treadles in the USA Today bestselling series set in Victorian England.

Inspector Treadles, Charlotte Holmes’s friend and collaborator, has been found locked in a room with two dead men, both of whom worked with his wife at the great manufacturing enterprise she has recently inherited.

Rumors fly. Had Inspector Treadles killed the men because they had opposed his wife’s initiatives at every turn? Had he killed in a fit of jealous rage, because he suspected Mrs. Treadles of harboring deeper feelings for one of the men? To make matters worse, he refuses to speak on his own behalf, despite the overwhelming evidence against him.

Charlotte finds herself in a case strewn with lies and secrets. But which lies are to cover up small sins, and which secrets would flay open a past better left forgotten? Not to mention, how can she concentrate on these murders, when Lord Ingram, her oldest friend and sometime lover, at last dangles before her the one thing she has always wanted?

Dear Ms. Thomas:

I’ll start by saying that I found this to be perhaps the least byzantine of the books in the series, a series I’ve been upfront about finding confusing a lot of the time. Since the previous books in the series have all received B range grades from me, it can be said that I enjoy them in spite of frequently being a bit lost. (Also, this is not to say that the plot of this book isn’t byzantine; there were so many people going in and out of the house where the murders take place on the night of that it started to feel like a clown car to me.)

It’s interesting to see Inspector Treadles referred to in the blurb as Charlotte’s friend, given that he has been in a pique for most of the four previous books after discovering that the brilliant Sherlock is actually the brilliant Charlotte. Still, Treadles has come a long way in his attitude towards women’s liberation, or what passed for it in Victorian England. By the end of the last book, he was both more accepting of Charlotte’s status as a fallen woman and secret genius detective, and of his wife’s determination to succeed at the head of the family business she inherited, Cousins Manufacturing.

It’s the company that’s seemingly at the center of the murder mystery, as the two murdered men, Mr. Longstead and his nephew, Mr. Sullivan, were both employed by Cousins Manufacturing. Mrs. Treadles comes to Charlotte seeking Sherlock Holmes’ help after her husband is arrested. In spite of her clear concern about her husband, Mrs. Treadles is obviously hiding something.

(Some light spoilers for earlier books in the series follow.)

Though the plot of Murder on Cold Street features two men ostensibly murdered by another man, the various ways in which women’s lives are manipulated and constrained by men is actually a stronger focus of the plot. Mrs. Treadles has struggled to gain control over Cousin Manufacturing, hampered by all of the men under her who think she’s not suited to be in charge. Both her sister-in-law, Mrs. Cousins, and Mrs. Sullivan, the widow of one of the murdered men, had unhappy marriages – the latter perversely obsessed with a husband who despised her. Charlotte’s sister Olivia and even her awful mother lead highly straitened lives that make them pretty unhappy much of the time.

Olivia has been a prominent secondary character in these books; in this one she’s a bit in the background as she does not interact with Charlotte until the end and thus isn’t involved in the main storyline. Olivia is stuck in the country with her odious mother, pining over her lost romance with Stephen Marbleton (Olivia doesn’t know that Stephen is back under the control of his father, the arch-villain Moriarty). The one comfort Olivia has is the Sherlock Holmes stories she’s been writing, and in the course of the book she moves towards attempting to get a story published. Olivia is a tremendously sympathetic character, and if and when the series ends I anticipate an HEA for her. (Moreso even than I do for Charlotte; though her and Ingram’s relationship makes some progress in this story, it’s hard to imagine a conventional ending for those two.)

One of the most interesting women in the book is Miss Longstead, the niece of one of the murdered men (and cousin to the other). An orphan of mixed race, it was her debutante party being held at 33 Cold Street the night the murders occurred at the house next door. She’s shown to be a sensitive and interesting character, and I hope we see her again.

I don’t have a lot to say about the mystery – the eventual resolution was not particularly surprising, though it was helpful, as always, to have the various pieces explicitly put together at the end. The crime is interesting for the way that it puts Inspector Treadles in jeopardy and, thus, obviously, affects Mrs. Treadles, but in and of itself I didn’t find it that compelling. (I will say that Inspector Treadles’ reason for not cooperating with the investigation did not bear up under close scrutiny, IMO.) But the urgency of the characters trying to save Treadles from being convicted of a capital crime (right before Christmas, no less! – the setting was very effectively conveyed) made for absorbing read.

One last niggle: the character of Inspector Brighton, the Scotland Yard investigator tasked with looking into the murders, makes a strong – and negative – early impression, and then just sort of disappears. Maybe he’ll be in future books?

My grade for Murder on Cold Street is a high B+.

Best,

Jennie

Sherry Thomas gives us the fifth in the Lady Sherlock mysteries in Murder on Cold Street. Charlotte Holmes, who solves mysteries as the "sister" of Sherlock Holmes, must find out who really murdered two men who were found in an abandoned house with Inspector Treadles. Mrs. Treadles has engaged her to solve this mystery and to find out what is happening at her factory. Lord Ingram and the rest of the crew help out in the solution. The explanation lies partially in the machinations of one evil man and also in the position of women in Victorian England.

FULL REVIEW ON FRESH FICTION
The fifth book in Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series, MURDER ON COLD STREET is an engaging murder mystery. Coming into this novel without having read the previous novels may leave some readers wondering what exactly is the nature of the various relationships Charlotte has with different characters, but the mystery is interesting and makes for page-turning intrigue. As expected, Charlotte dons different disguises and makes observations of the smallest details, which inform her final conclusions about the nature of Inspector Treadles’ involvement with the murders. While there are some instances of long-winded explanations and recounts of events, as well as quite a bit of focus on Charlotte’s love of sweets and her resulting plump figure, the threat of danger lurking is enthralling, particularly in the form of the still-mysterious Moriarty, who seems to have some sort of hand in all of the nefarious deeds taking place in London. While there are some enthralling exchanges and surprising events, this book didn’t have the same breakneck pace as the earlier books. Different characters are given scenes from their points of view, but these instances were brief and hard to discern from the chapters from Charlotte’s perspective. Charlotte and Lord Ingram’s slow-burn romance is still going, and they do seem more comfortable in their attraction and feelings. Seeing many of the beloved side characters was enjoyable as well. Like many of the other books in this series, events set in motion in MURDER ON COLD STREET are sure to come up again in future books--so pay close attention!

I have read all of the books in this series and continue to find them entertaining. Murder on Cold Street revolves around Charlottes "frenemy," Inspector Treadles, when he is accused of murdering his wife's business associate in a fit of jealousy. The Mystery, as always, was entertaining and full of twists, although the interviewing of witnesses was a bit too drawn out at times. I do love the fact that, though Charlotte believes she lacks the normal range of human emotions, most of her mysteries revolve around people she is very obviously emotionally invested in.
I finally feel as though things are progressing between Charlotte and Lord Ingram. In the last two books, I began to get a little frustrated with the two of them. No sooner do they take a step toward a romantic relationship, then they take two steps back. In Murder on Cold Street we finally see Charlotte realizing her feelings for Lord Ingram are more than just physical and that she may just be capable of love after all. And Lord Ingram is finally smartening up and realizing that if he wants Charlotte, he will have to let go of his conventional standards.
I will continue to enjoy this series in the future and look forward to revisiting Charlotte's colorful friends and family.

Thanks for the copy of this book! I enjoyed Sherry's virtual presentation at the Emerald City Writers Conference (2020), and look forward to reading this soon.

This is the first book that I've read in the Lady Sherlock series (although this is book 5). I found the book quite delightful. The characters were fully fleshed out and the plot was interesting. Quite a diverting read. I recommend it!

Fantastic!

This was my first time picking up a book from this series, and it did not disappoint!! I'll definitely need to read the others in order to get a few of the smaller storylines here and there at the beginning but I really genuinely loved this and it kept me guessing right up until the very end!