JANE AND THE STILLROOM MAID

Nominally under the protection of her hymn-singing, trout-fishing, sycophantic cousin Edward Cooper, Jane Austen visits the Derbyshire Peak District in her fifth outing (Jane and the Genius of the Place, 1999, etc.) In this social comedy gone terribly wrong, Jane can't take a lone ramble in the hills without stumbling across a disemboweled young “man”—who turns out to be Tess Arnold, stillroom maid at a nearby estate. Has the victim been accidentally mistaken for the country apothecary, sometimes thought a witch? Or was she blackmailing aristocrats with unseemly secrets? Why is she in those male clothes? And why does her carved-up body seem to illustrate the Masonic ritual for executing traitors? Jane's aristocratic connection, gentleman rogue Lord Harold Trowbridge, turns up at the estate next door, mourning its recently deceased hostess, the colorful Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. His presence keeps Jane alert to possible connections between the late maid and Georgiana's politically powerful Whig Cavendish family—and a good thing, since he’s too besotted with Georgiana’s daughter, Lady Harriot, to see much else. Only Jane can work through the web of domestic intrigue woven around Tess Arnold. Cryptic though it is, Tess’s stillroom journal supplies all the clues Jane needs to unravel the multiply intermeshed mysteries.

Now that she’s rebutted years of condescending descriptions of Austen's life as placid and uneventful, Barron writes with greater assurance than ever, and her heroine’s sleuthing is more confident and accomplished—even if she’s still unwisely pining for the unworthy Trowbridge.