Status Updates From The Mystery of Charles Dickens

One of my friends said this book reads like someone's thesis. She's right. I'm reading this for a book club, so I will try and finish it, but it is slow going, and it skips around in time a lot, and referees to various parts of different Dickens works. Now I have read some of Dicken's novels, but the author seems to think people reading this book are familiar with ALL of Dicken's work, and I'm not.