For many, summer reads are new releases hot off the presses. And authors never fail to fill our beach bags with great stories. However, I like to use this time to catch up on all the current mystery and thriller releases from my to-be-read pile. I was delighted when one of my favorite author's new books hit the shelves. Stephanie Barron's latest "Being A Jane Austen Mystery," Jane and the Final Mystery, is a bittersweet wrapup to her long and beloved series featuring Miss Austen herself as the sleuth.
It was March 1817, and Jane Austen’s declining health had disrupted progress on her latest manuscript. She longs to seek treatment in London, but finances and fickle inheritance entanglements make it impossible. When her nephew Edward brings chilling news of a death at his former school, Winchester College, Jane summons all her energy to try and discover the truth. A senior pupil at the prestigious all-boys school has been found dead in a nearby culvert. In the pocket of his drenched waistcoat is an incriminating note penned by the young son of Jane’s dear friend Elizabeth. Jane quickly discovers Winchester College is a world unto itself, with rites of passage, cruel hazing, and dangerous pranks. Can Jane clear William’s name and put right an injustice threatening to ruin a bright and promising young woman’s future before the author’s illness stops her?
Jane and the Final Mystery is beautifully written and has a cadence that makes you want to read it aloud.
Jane and the Final Mystery is the 15th novel in Stephanie Barron’s “Being A Jane Austen Mystery.” It’s a well-crafted story with enough twists, misdirection, period language, and deportment to please mystery readers and Austen fans alike. Writing as Francine Matthews, Barron has penned seven installments of her Nantucket Mysteries series, as well as another three standalones.
As the final chapter of Jane Austen’s life closes, Barron gives readers a satisfying closure. As fans, we’d have liked the woman who taught us about love and how to spot a cad at 50 paces to have lived a long, healthy life enhanced by a blissful marriage to her own Mr. Darcy, but that wasn’t Jane Austen’s journey. She never married and died at age 41 of Addison’s disease. Jane and the Final Mystery is beautifully written and has a cadence that makes you want to read it aloud.
Comments