The Great Shelby Holmes by Elizabeth Eulberg (review)

John Watson and his mom, an Army doctor who has served in Afghanistan, have just moved into their Baker Street apartment and met their neighbor in apartment 221B, Shelby Holmes, who at the tender age of nine, is a rising sixth-grader like John. She’s also a socially inept loner of sorts, who seems to know everyone in the area but has never formed a friendship with anyone. Bored with unpacking boxes, John hangs around with Shelby and promptly discovers she has a local reputation for solving mysteries; his summer becomes anything but dull as Shelby drags him along on an investigation of a missing King Charles Spaniel, Daisy, who is favored to win at a prestigious dog show. Eulberg obviously has a fine time with Holmesian references, scattering tidbits from Mom’s Afghanistan military service (well, you couldn’t expect John himself to have been to war, could you?) to Shelby’s expedient alias, Petunia Cumberbatch. However, too much of the book’s success depends on knowing these allusions that are essentially adult aimed, since middlegrade readers are unlikely to be fully up to speed on their Conan Doyle. Perhaps subsequent reading will lead them to “Silver Blaze,” upon which this plot seems loosely based; until then, they may simply enjoy getting in on the ground floor of a new mystery series.