From Amazon.com
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
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
In this diverting but rather labored installment in Barron's popular Jane Austen mystery series (Jane and the Wandering Eye, 1997, etc.), Barron opens the drawing rooms to political winds, as Jane tackles a murder with possible links to Napoleon's threatened invasion of the English coastline. Sojourning in Kent at the lavish estate of her brother Neddie and his wife, Lizzy, Jane attends the Canterbury Races, where she witnesses a bizarre series of events. A French-born seductress named Francoise Grey strikes an unknown gentleman with her whip; after the race, Mrs. Grey dramatically drives off and, later, her corpse, "quite devoid of her scarlet [riding] habit," is found back on the racegrounds in the chaise of scoundrel Denys Collingforth. All of Kent clamors for Neddie, a Justice of the Peace, to arrest Collingforth, but Jane persuades him to investigate further. As the town prepares for evacuation, Jane and Neddie interrogate sundry suspicious characters, including the widowed Valentine Grey, a shadowy banker whose professed ignorance of his late wife's adultery rings false; the unctuous Comte de Penfleur, Mrs. Grey's relative and possible lover; and Anne Sharpe, the Austen family's governess, whose distress at the death is unaccountably extreme. Once again, Barron artfully replicates Austen's voice, sketches several delightful portraits (especially of the elegant and playful Lizzy) and dazzles her audience with period details. But the plot is both static and convoluted, and the revelation of the murderer is overburdened with historical significance, a far cry from the real Jane Austen's light style. Author tour.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
