Finished the last book a couple weeks back, and my reaction was mostly relief? The final mystery ties up neatly enough, the villain gets what’s coming, and Enola’s professional status is secured. It wraps the ongoing threads from the later books. But satisfying... that’s trickier. It feels very ‘case closed’ in a procedural sense, yet the emotional resolution with Sherlock and Mycroft felt abrupt to me. After all that tension and independence, the familial reconciliation happens almost off-page. I wanted a longer, messier conversation, maybe a real fight. The ending serves the plot but left me a bit cold on the character front, which was what I was really there for.
That said, seeing Enola fully established as a detective in her own right, no longer living in her brothers' shadow, was gratifying. The author makes it clear her journey was about achieving that recognition. If you read the series for Enola’s triumphs over Victorian society’s constraints, you’ll probably close the book happy. I just craved a deeper peek into the personal cost of those triumphs.