FernFolio

Capital of England and the 19th century world, the proud and beautiful city of London of the late 1860s is also a city full of bigotry, hatred and despair, something young Sherlock Holmes knows only too well.  The product of a runaway marriage between the daughter of a well-to-do country squire and a brilliant but impoverished Jewish university student, Sherlock has grown up in genteel and almost desperate poverty.  While his father tends the birds at the Crystal Palace, his mother teaches singing lessons and takes in sewing.  The two are clearly devoted to each other, and to their bright and observant son, but grown old before their time, ground down by their hard lives.
It is his parents’ fondest wish that Sherlock get a good education so that he can aspire to a more comfortable life than theirs, but the young teenager has not attended school in months, ever since he was attacked by school bullies who see in him an easy mark for their racist taunts.  Instead, he spends his days in Trafalgar Square, observing the people around him, and honing his almost eery ability to read in their faces and mannerisms, speech and clothing, the most intimate details of their lives.
After reading about the murder of a young woman in Whitechapel and the subsequent arrest of Mohammad Adalji, a young Arab butcher, Sherlock’s curiosity takes him to Old Bailey for the arraignment of the accused killer.  A long-time victim of anti-Semitic epithets and well versed in the vicious impulses of a bloodthirsty mob, Sherlock finds himself feeling a certain sympathy for the accused and, when the young man sees him in the crowd and whispers to the boy, “I didn’t do it!”, Sherlock decides that he will have to save Adalji from the hangman’s noose.
Observed by police when he visits the site of the murder, Sherlock finds that he himself has fallen under suspicion.  Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard has decided that he and Adalji were working together robbing people the night that the young woman was murdered, and soon Sherlock is running for his life, determined to stay out of police custody and to find the real killer before Adalji’s, and his own, time runs out.
Eye of the Crow is a story about a brilliant and complicated young man whose skills and attitudes have been indelibly marked by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing.  Beautifully written and richly detailed, this novel will challenge young readers to think about the effects of prejudice both on the people of Sherlock’s world and of our own.
FernFolio Editor