Description:
Serious scholars might disagree, but it seems to at least one amateur Austenite that Stephanie Barron has captured Jane Austen's voice perfectly in her scrupulously researched and scrumptuously written mysteries starring the celebrated English novelist. "There are not many uses for a baronet's daughter, but the steady management of a gentleman's household may safely be described as one of them," Barron writes in the fourth book in this remarkable series, a line that could have been plucked from anywhere in the actual canon. Jane is talking about her sister-in-law Elizabeth, who runs her brother Edward's Godmersham estate in Kent. It's here that Jane comes for a visit in the summer of 1805--and gets caught up not only in a murder mystery but the planned invasion of England by Napoleon, which ended in the Battle of Trafalgar. Austen, of course, had all the qualities of a good detective: the superb attention to detail, fervid imagination, and salty disdain for pretension. Barron makes excellent use of these attributes, plopping Jane Poirot-like into the middle of a crime at the Canterbury Races, then surrounding her with mysterious and possibly sinister figures involved in aiding or thwarting Napoleon's plans. The writing, as stylized as it is ("There is nothing like the country for the rapid communication of what is dreadful"), never gets in the way of Barron's carefully plotted story, and in the end most readers will find they've managed to satisfy their appetites both for Austen and for mystery. First-timers will be delighted to hear that the three earlier books in Barron's series (Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, Jane and the Man of the Cloth, and Jane and the Wandering Eye) are available in paperback. --Dick Adler
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