More like two and a half stars. 
 I'll admit, when I heard that they were making an American version of the BBC show Sherlock, only with Watson as a woman, my face scrunched up in annoyance. Now, I am perfectly aware that men and women can be friends without sexual or romantic feelings, but usually the entertainment industry has not caught on to that fact yet. (No, I have not watched the show and I do not have an interest in doing so). So although I was not crazy about the idea of a female Holmes, A Study in Charlotte sounded interesting enough to pick up. 
 Well, this book was actually pretty boring. I know, how could a book about a murder mystery be boring? But it was. 
 Jamie Watson is our first person narrator. Like John Watson, the kid is a completely girl-crazy, constantly thinking about the pretty girls at school, even fixating his romantic notions on Charlotte Holmes, though he's content with imagining their relationship instead of saying something. Since Holmes keeps him out of the loop on a regular basis, the story gets pretty dull because Watson never knows what's going on. I suppose that was the point, making him the narrator instead of Holmes, who may or may not have been even more boring if she knew all of the answers, but we'll never know. Either way, the story was mostly Watson following Holmes around like a lost puppy from A to B to C, not understanding why in most cases. Yawn. 
 The clues are so vague that you can't really solve the mystery as a reader, meaning you focus on what you do know, which ends up having nothing to do with the case in the end. For example, I thought that maybe Lena secretly had it in for Holmes. She liked to flirt with Watson, who was attached to Holmes's hip, and had access to Holmes's cotton candy perfume. Maybe she was a Moriarty, or part of a family that Holmes had somehow 'wronged'. Maybe Tom was in on it too. Well, no, that wasn't right, because Lena was innocent and Tom was working for a red herring that I'm not sure was ever resolved? When Holmes suspected the nurse, I scoffed and was like "Why? We know practically nothing about her. She's barely in the story." Anyway, I can sympathize with how frustrated Watson got at the lack of information, because I was frustrated as well. 
 Everything is laid out for Watson, and by extension, the reader, in the last ten percent of the book, mostly by the culprit, and the rest by Holmes. Of course, Moriarty had something to do with it, if you were at all surprised. 
 Of course, so many books lately seem to have one of my reading pet peeves, which is to have someone else narrate the epilogue. That's right, Jamie Watson is our narrator for ninety-nine percent of the book, but Charlotte Holmes gets to narrate the epilogue. AUTHORS, STOP DOING THIS! 
 This might have been better with a third person narrative, or Charlotte Holmes as the narrator.