August 15, 2023
Though it's set in an insular English boarding school, the fictional Jane Austen's 15th and final case strikes uncomfortably close to home. At first the death of Arthur Prendergast, a bullying prefect at Winchester College, is a cause for rejoicing for William Heathcote, the nephew of Jane's dear friend Alethea Bigg, whose stutter made him a natural target for Prenders' daily torments. But several rapid developments dramatically reverse William's feelings. The overbearing prefect didn't throw himself into the culvert in which he apparently drowned but was bashed on the head beforehand. The note inviting Prenders to a meeting there was written by William himself. And after Peter Insley, the prefect's chief disciple, testifies to a coroner's jury that William had been involved in an unseemly relationship with a local woman, William, who's also suspected of starting a suspicious fire at the college, is indicted for Prendergast's murder and carried off to jail. The fatal bout of apoplexy of Baronet Frederick Beaumont, the prefect's father, signals further troubles that persist beyond William's arrest. Luckily, Jane, alerted by her nephew Edward, a Winchester alumnus who's remained interested in the college, is on the case. Despite the gnawing illness that will soon end her life at 41, she descends sedately but incisively on the college, raising questions no one else dares to raise with the headmaster, Dr. Gabell, and his elderly and resentful second-in-command, Ruthven Clarke, and eventually uncovering a secret birthright that provides a motive for a suspect whom many readers will have been watching alertly from the beginning. An appropriately decorous, if not terribly mystifying, valediction for a surprisingly resourceful sleuth.
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Starred review from August 14, 2023
Barron’s poignant 15th and final whodunit featuring Jane Austen as a sleuth (after 2022’s Jane and the Year Without a Summer) is set in 1817, the year of the author’s death. Suffering from an unknown ailment and determined not to brood on the ravages of her declining health, Jane agrees to investigate the case of 16-year-old Winchester College student William Heathcote, a friend of her nephew, Edward. Relentlessly mocked at school because of his stutter, William stands accused of knocking his chief tormentor, Arthur Pendergast, on the head and sending him into a canal where he drowned. Another student swears Arthur intended to expose William’s illicit alliance with a local girl and William killed him to protect the lady’s reputation. To make matters worse, William refuses to reveal his whereabouts on the day Arthur died. Jane’s investigation uncovers a dark plot to frame William and foment rebellion at the school. Barron expertly underscores the purposeful cruelty and classism of English public schools in Austen’s time, which existed strictly to harden the future leaders of the Empire, and elicits deep emotion out of Jane’s struggles against her own mortality. This is a fitting send-off for a beautifully realized series. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, ICM Partners.
September 1, 2023
The fifteenth and final volume of a beloved and critically acclaimed series in which Jane Austen is a detective. Set in 1817, the year of the real Austen's death, Jane again confronts an injustice of her time: the abuse of vulnerable schoolboys by their peers and schoolmasters. William Heathcote, the "delicate" young son of Jane's lifelong friend, Elizabeth Bigg Heathcote, has been accused of murdering a classmate who had been harassing him, and Jane must clear William's name before she is overcome completely by her declining health. Jane's nephew Edward, based upon Austen's real-life nephew, assists in the sleuthing. As a graduate of Winchester College, where the deceased and the accused were both enrolled, Edward is able to offer Jane insider knowledge of the school's rites and rituals. Barron developed Jane's narrative voice by reading Austen's collected and published letters, and it is neither spoiler nor surprise to say that series readers will be sorry to say goodbye to Jane Austen, amateur sleuth.
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