PRIDE, PREJUDICE & POISON

Blake’s first novel under this pseudonym is an uneasy mix of Jane Austen, small-town Yorkshire intrigue, and murder most foul.

Although nobody much likes Sylvia Pemberthy, the loudmouthed current president of Kirkbymoorside’s branch of the Jane Austen Society, everybody’s duly surprised when she succumbs to a dose of arsenic during a tea break from an endearingly fractious meeting. DI Peter Hemming suspects Farnsworth Appleby, the tragic widow who served the fatal tea. But bookseller Erin Coleridge, certain that her friend would never have fed a fellow Austenite rat poison, resolves to do some snooping of her own. Her tactics include questioning the members of the JAS circle, eavesdropping, lying, huddling with Farnsworth to compare notes, passing herself off as a civilian consultant to the police, and boldly telling Hemming when he’s wrong. The real story here is indicated when Erin, contemplating Hemming, “sense[s] something wounded deep inside him” and when Hemming, reflecting on his feelings for Erin, admits to himself, “every sensible instinct told him it was a bad idea.” Throughout the dance of crime and detection, characters constantly one-up each other by dropping quotations from Austen. But although Erin sells several books and gives away several more, very little reading gets done because the cast members are too busy gossiping about each other, bickering with each other, and attempting to run each other’s cars off the road. The steady drip of Austen tags sets an impossibly high bar for Blake’s prose, and the revelations of the culprit and the motive beggar belief.

Strictly for Austen fans with a high tolerance for archly obvious wit.