A MURDEROUS PERSUASION

A Jane Austen Murder Mystery week spawns an actual homicide. Who’d of thought it?

Bent on dissuading her aunt, Wendy Prescott, from selling the struggling Laurel Springs Inn, Prof. Phaedra Brighton, of Somerset University, hatches the idea of sponsoring a seven-day event that will attract Austen fans from across Virginia, assign them roles in a climactic staging of Persuasion, encourage them to dress in period costume and inhabit their characters during the run-up, and dole out clues as to which character is going to kill which. Phaedra’s carefully crafted plot is promptly upstaged by the unknown party who shoots overbearing Regency romance novelist Harriet Overton dead with an arrow. All the guests had ample opportunity to kill her, and most of them have motives. Her henpecked husband, Tom Overton, was a college archer before his marriage made him a worm ripe for turning. Harriet had trashed technical editor Felicity Penrose’s attempt to write a romance novel years ago. And she was pretty clearly blackmailing Rollo Barron, a Richmond Times-Dispatch journalist whose review of her latest, The Duplicitous Duke, morphed literally overnight from a pan to a paean. The killer, not content with hitting a single target, locks Phaedra in an uninhabited house’s coal cellar shortly after she rescues Victoria Sutton, the administrative assistant to real estate broker Brian Callahan, from the bottom of a well. The distraught heroine finds it hard to trust the motives of Brian, Wendy’s high school boyfriend, or Prof. Mark Selden, the British Shakespearean who’s uncomfortably attentive to her. The celebration ends up largely forgotten in the rush to identify the killer before the end of the week.

Just the thing for readers who think Donna Andrews’ Virginia cozies could use a drop of Jane Austen.