Murder on Cold Street (Lady Sherlock, #5)

by Sherry Thomas

Another part, and he wondered how large this part might be, was attributable to the fact that she was impervious to the dictates of moral absolutes.

He is both fascinated and slightly repulsed by her difference

Unlike with most everyone else, it had left little impression on her and she viewed telling the truth as a situational, rather than an ethical, choice.

Moral fluidity

But truth had a vicious way of upsetting everything else on its way to the surface. And he was hard-pressed to say, as someone whose existence had been repeatedly convulsed by recent overdoses of truth, whether there had been anything satisfactory to the aftermaths.

Overdose of truth an interesting phrase

but out of fear of what she and her autonomy represented—rejection of the very hierarchy he was still trying to embrace.

Concise summation of what has kept them apart

Perhaps the oblique and unspecified had been all that they’d needed. Perhaps that had been all that they’d been capable of.

!

He would not do the same to Holmes, to blanket her, even if it was with love, when she preferred to be without encumbrances. Was there not something she desired that he could give her? Ah, but from the very beginning, she’d always been clear about what she wanted from him. Which he had been too proud—and too afraid—to give. Because . . . what if it was the only thing she would ever want from him? But today, under her steady blue gaze—today he wasn’t so proud. Or so afraid.

more gender rev. A thought process generally experienced through the woman's pov just before she gives in.

softly, “I didn’t give in to an impulse, Holmes. I made a choice.”

Distinction with a difference

Love/lust at first sight

In the years since, they had never truly deviated from that pattern. She was the aggressor. She wanted things: his company, his letters, and later, his body. He kept his distance and withheld his body as if he were the city of Vienna and she the Mongol Horde just outside the gate.

thomas manages this role reversal without turning Lord Ingram into a wimp or Charlotte into a hussy (except with him) because their reactions are so specific to each other.

He had always wanted to give her everything. But it had been an everything that revolved around him. He’d never known what she wanted. And how could he have, when he firmly believed that he knew enough for both of them?

simple but elegant expression of the selfishness that underlays the "benign" misogyny of Victorian angel in the home sentimentalism. Not bad self awareness from Inspector Treadles! I still don't like him though

But those filaments of dismay were buried under an avalanche of relief.

Nice sentence

‘Don’t forget, sir, that I am a queen upon this board, and I do not play to lose.’”

Queen Upon This Board should be the title of the final book