Baroness James combines her love of the murder mystery story with her love of Jane Austen to pen this sequel to Pride and Prejudice.
On the night before Lady Anne's Ball, Mr and Mrs Darcy (nee Elizabeth Bennett) are entertaining the Bingleys, Colonel Fitzwilliam and Mr Alveston when a spectral coach hurtles through the windy night to disgorge Lydia, Lizzie's sister, screaming that her husband, Wickham, has been murdered in the night. But who has been killed, who is the mysterious ghost woman, and why are Darcy's initials carved into the trees?
There are some nice touches such as the discussion about the need for an appeal court :"That would be the ultimate idiocy, and if carried on ad infinitum could presumably result in a foreign court trying English cases. And that would be the end of more than our legal system." Other elements of the oeuvre are mentioned such as the Elliots from Persuasion and the Knightleys from Mansfield Park. James enjoys pastiching the Pride and Prejudice characters such as Lady Catherine de Bourgh, Mr Collins, and Mr Bennett but the characterisations are too modern and the dialogue never quite right; she succeeds only in confirming that Jane Austen is inimitable. And the pace of the plot seems flawed. We have a lot of family trivia to get through before the first body is found, there are too few clues, there is a sudden break with the words 'some months later' written all over it, and the denouement is disappointing.
A cute and clever book but not a great read either as an Austen sequel or as a detective story.
January 2012; 310 pages
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