“I would very much like to know why my mother named me “Enola,” which, backwards, spells alone.”

From Nancy Springer’s The Case of the Missing Marquess.

Raised by her eccentric mother, young Enola Holmes has been allowed to grow up bold, curious, wild, and free.  Enola’s Mother has been sure to fill her life with activities that let her thrive both mentally and physically.  However, Enola’s life is completely thrown off course when she wakes up on her fourteenth birthday to find that her mother is gone, leaving only a few birthday gifts in her absence.  Enola’s older brothers, the wealthy and proper Mycroft and the brilliant detective Sherlock, arrive at the family home to discover what happened to their mother.  Mycroft is appalled to see the state of Enola’s upbringing and the estate’s disrepair, so he plans to send Enola to a girl’s finishing school while Sherlock searches for clues to their mother’s whereabouts.  Unwilling to give up on her mother or her freedom, Enola begins looking for her mother and realizes that her birthday gifts are actually clues that she left behind.  When she runs away to London, Enola learns of a young runaway, Viscount Tewksbury, and meets the mystic, Madame Laelia, that the family brought by the family to find the boy.  While following her mother’s trail, Enola realizes that Tewksbury is in greater danger than she realized, so she must pause her search to help the boy, while also trying to avoid the police and her older brothers.

The first book in Springer’s juvenile mystery series creates a captivating story that takes familiar characters to build a new world. The style is similar to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock stories in that the clues are scattered all throughout the book, but the story does suffer from a dry start that will turn off some readers. By the book’s end, The Case of the Missing Marquess is a thrilling mystery that will easily bring readers back for more adventures.