PRIDE, PREJUDICE, AND PERIL

Oliver links her passion for all things Jane Austen to a cozy whodunit.

Despite her mother’s best attempts to set her up with a string of suitable men, Phaedra Brighton insists that she’s doing just fine. At 34, she’s a professor of English at Virginia’s fictional Somerset University who dons empire-waist dresses for her lectures on Austen; she’s perfectly content living alone with her cat, Wickham; and now, as she prepares to welcome Oxford-trained Shakespearean Mark Selden to Somerset, she’s serving as historical consultant on the sort-of-reality show Who Wants To Marry Mr. Darcy? The series, originally cast as Who Wants To Marry a Fortune? was renamed and redesigned when pharmaceutical magnate Harold Fortune, the lord of the Marling estate where the show is being filmed, died and left most of his estate not to the daughters who’d expected to star but to his nephew, William Collier. Charlene Lucas Collier, the old friend of Phaedra’s who’s just married Bill, insists that he’s kind and considerate, but he pitches a fit when he learns that his bride has loaned an antique jeweled choker to Tinsley Prentiss, the bachelorette cardiologist vying for the favors of Nick Ross, the heartthrob Welsh actor starring as Darcy. So there’s more shock than grief when Phaedra, soon after the choker is stolen, finds Bill dead in his clawfoot bathtub in Marling. There’ll be yet more violence, including an attempt on the life of Phaedra, who insists that “all she wanted was a good man,” once she refuses Detective Matteo Morelli’s demands to stop trying to clear Charlene by catching the murderer.

Oliver bustles so nimbly among the assorted academics, relatives, and TV types that the killer sneaks in under the radar.