The Sherlock Society

In The Sherlock Society, the main characters begin with ordinary adolescent aims such as earning money, chasing adventure, and building social standing. The book follows their shift from running a business built around personal gain into forming a team guided by a sense of duty to their community and environment. As Zoe, Alex, Yadi, and Lina rethink their goals, they learn the value of addressing community needs rather than just their own. The story argues that it is right to address a harm that needs immediate attention, even when it offers no personal reward.

At the start, Zoe grounds the detective agency in practical, self-serving aims. She first proposes the group hoping to raise money for a trendy summer camp after her fight with her friends Brooke and Chelsea. Her pitch to Alex, Yadi, and Lina frames the agency as a way to reach specific goals, and she tells them, “This will put the money in our hands. This will give us power” (47). Details of her initial plan for starting the agency highlight the superficiality of her perspective at this point in the story. She bombards Alex with trendy but relatively empty ideas she has gained from TED talks on business, full of unmerited confidence and uninterested in thinking deeply or analytically about the difficulties of two children starting their own detective agency. She imagines a “buzzworthy” business with flyers and a marketing plan and does not consider the legal or safety aspects of her plan. Because the escape room game early in the story has already shown that Zoe is clever and perceptive, the contrast between her innate intelligence and her impulsive plan to start a detective agency highlights how very driven she is to get enough money to go to the summer camp and impress Brooke and Chelsea.

Their first case, a search for Al Capone’s buried treasure, keeps this focus on profit. Solving the mystery of what happened to Capone’s money will not benefit other people in any meaningful way—it will only benefit the members of the Sherlock Society. Each member imagines a personal payoff, from Alex’s paddleboard to Zoe’s camp tuition. At this point, their detective work stays tied to individual wants.

The discovery of illegal dumping in the Everglades shifts the group’s direction. Once they see the poisoned water and dead animals in the slough, their interest in Capone’s money disappears. Zoe responds first, telling the others, “Al Capone’s money has been buried for nearly a century. It’s not going anywhere. But this? This just happened, and we need to find who did it” (185). This moment replaces their abstract interest in adventure with a direct responsibility to uncover the source of the pollution. The team’s focus turns toward the prosecution of Morris Kane and his company instead of a finder’s fee.

Their purpose sharpens once Zoe repeats her parents’ motto and says the reward is “doing what’s right, not what’s easy” (185). The group then gathers evidence, reports the dumping to the Miccosukee Police, and later brings their findings to the Secret Service. This involvement of various police and governmental agencies highlights the community-focused nature of their investigation into the illegal dumping. When they were searching for Al Capone’s treasure, only a few private individuals were involved in their efforts—but now that they are trying to do something meaningful on behalf of their whole community, their whole community is involved in their investigation. By choosing a dangerous and demanding path to protect their community and its environment, the Sherlock Society reaches a new level of maturity defined by commitment instead of profit.