Where Jane Saves Her Own Neck

Jane and the Barque of Frailty by Stephanie Barron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm still on my second time through the Jane Austen mysteries, and I'm only loving them more.

I wasn't a mystery reader until I got hooked on this series, and I'm only now getting kinda good at it. There's a bit of genre savvy required to read them right, and I didn't have it at first. It's not just knowing that the first person pointed at probably isn't the murderer, like in a police procedural, or getting good at guessing who the culprit really is before it's revealed. (I'm not necessarily all that good at the latter, anyway.) There's also the ability to pay attention well enough that you know who people are, how they're related to each other, what their motivations are, which things they both know and which things only one of them knows, and where individuals were at different times during the course of the story. That stuff's hard once you have more than a tiny handful of characters. But you can get better at it, even if you have a notoriously faulty memory. (Also me.)

Agatha Christie takes this to extremes in some of her mysteries, especially the ones where the murder, the murderer, and all the suspects are isolated--and all the isolated people are suspects--on the Orient Express or at a summer home or on a ship down the Nile and it's Poirot's job to establish the movements of everyone involved down to the minute. (I guess people refer to these as closed circle mysteries or locked room mysteries.) That's more puzzle than story to me, and not as much my thing (though I have loved a few Agatha Christie novels), but it really does concentrate those analytical elements that a lot of mystery readers love. (I wonder if a modern detective in that sort of novel would benefit from using a spreadsheet...)

It's not quite that intense in this mystery or the series, and that's good IMO, because this is a lot closer to the feel I like, that of a Jane Austen novel of manners, with visits and balls and conversations over tea. There are family subplots and a larger, biographical arc stretched across all the books in the series, that give it more interest to me. In this novel, we have a little scandal among great lords and ladies in London, with a Russian princess making a spectacle of herself because of her apparent love for Lord Castlereagh just hours before she's found dead near his front door. The story involves other kept women and prostitutes of various degrees--here charmingly referred to, at times, as a "Barque of Frailty," (hence the title)--in a way unlike actual Austen novels. But it's refreshing more than anything else. The real Jane gave us a narrow worldview, the type allowed in novels at the time, but Stephanie Barron lets us see a broader cross-section of Regency England, a bit more of real people, and it's like having a brain itch scratched. I like it.

Jane herself (the character) becomes a suspect when she and her SIL are given some jewels to sell for a friend that turn out to come from the murdered princess. It becomes even more important that she solve this crime than others, because it's her neck this time, and for plot reasons they don't tell anyone about it.

Beautifully written. Well researched. Lots of interesting characters. It's still 5 stars to me, and if I kept better track of the characters and their movements this time, well, I guess I'm still learning. Recommended.

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