What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper Book

I got about 4 pages into this before I had to go look up profiles of all 3 of the James siblings on Wikipedia (William, Henry, Alice), because I realized I knew nothing about any of them. After I read the profiles, and got a little farther into the book, I started questioning why this story was written as, essentially, Real Person Fanfiction instead of an original work with fictional characters. It seemed like the circumstances and narrative were stretched to hang over the framework of the James family dynamic, where a set of characters not based on historical figures could have offered a lot more flexibility. Unless - and this was not made clear on Wikipedia - the James siblings did actually investigate Jack the Ripper?

The character of Alice and her personal circumstances (an invalid solving crimes) are interesting, and she was my favorite character of the book. I wish she got more screen time, especially given the title, I was not prepared for her brothers to be featured so prominently. However - I think the concept - a shut in solving mysteries - has been done MUCH better previously, by Rex Stout, with Nero Wolfe.

One of the things that drove me crazy in this book was the rampant unnecessary namedropping. (To be fair, this also drove me crazy in March, another instance of (I felt) Real Person Fanfiction, but one that won the Pulitzer, so clearly I was alone in that opinion.) But in this book, it was like the names of other famous people were being used to authenticate the characters and the setting. Drove. Me. Nuts. Nevermind the number of literary figures of the time that were included - at least there was a flimsy excuse for having them all involved, due to Henry James. But William Minor? (The Madman of The Professor & the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity & the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary) Why was this necessary?

The writing style was also lacking - especially in dialogue between characters. For someone trying to give the impression of an author (Henry James) with a tendency towards verbose and lengthy speech (examples here), having the (fictional) Henry James speak in short simplistic sentences was just poor judgement on the part of this author.

For a book that is ostensibly a mystery/thriller, the plot is not mysterious or thrilling.

I will end with this statement, from the Wikipedia page on Henry James, which describes everything this book is not.
"James claimed that a text must first and foremost be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. Good novels, to James, show life in action and are, most importantly, interesting. The concept of a good or bad novel is judged solely upon whether the author is good or bad."