While I was initially interested because it's in the same world as Sherlock Holmes, young Jack Moreno kept me interested as a very witty and street-smart narrator. We follow Jack as he struggles to keep his broken family a-float by working his father's shifts at a private school for troubled youth outside Provo, UT. At this school descendants of both Sherlock Holmes and John Watson happen to reside, though they're not completely like their famous ancestors. In this world, though Holmes and Watson were real-life people, the Sherlock Holmes books and subsequent pop culture also exist so it makes for a really compelling juxtaposition between what were the detectives actually like and what the modern culture thinks of them and how that affects their descendants today.

Jack was made the head of the family at a young 15 years old when his mother died in a car accident that left his father with severe brain injuries - Jack was able to walk away barely injured. Likely due to survivor's guilt and PTSD, he blames himself for her death and his father's medical problems and so pushes himself to the brink trying to take care of his dad the best he can. This means covering his dad's shifts as a maintenance/janitorial worker at the private school they also reside at and homeschooling himself through the internet. Besides this, he uses the rest of whatever free time he has to date a local girl in nearby Provo and fulfill his role of being the "bad kid" (drugs and drug sales, sex, etc.) that will later in the story put him in a bad place with the local law enforcement.

Jack finds a murdered student that happens to be a relative of John Watson which sets everything in the book off. Halloway Holmes is also a student at the school and is suspicious of Jack but they get to know each other and eventually team up to try to solve the murder. During all this Jack also has flashbacks throughout the book that makes it seem like maybe the accident was much more than that, though we don't find out what these flashbacks mean in this book, but it's obviously building up to a later book's mystery.

The main murder gets solved but also leaves a lot of other unanswered questions that will obviously be the basis of the subsequent books' mystery. This series is being released pretty quickly so I assume that Ashe probably wrote them at once in an effort to keep the mystery straight and sensical. It has a pretty slow start and while I did enjoy both Jack and Halloway as characters, I didn't really care about any the secondary characters so I got bored through some parts. For example, Jack's girlfriend was just about pointless which makes me feel slightly sorry for her - this book has a buildup of sexual tension between Jack and Halloway that doesn't progress much in this book, but Jack obviously has feelings for this Holmes so needs to make some tough decisions to save everyone more heartache. The cops and teachers got a lot of time on the page but the ending of the book made it seem like we won't really see much of them again, so felt a bit pointless as well.

Overall, I do want to continue with the series but I hope that the pace picks up a bit and we aren't introduced to a ton of new characters when it's already a bit bloated.