Jane and the Barque of Frailty

Zusatztext “Satisfying right to the last revelation…. The author excels at both period detail and modern verve…. Sparkling.”— Publishers Weekly “Barron's research is impeccable! bringing the sights and sounds of Austen's era to the page with detail and sparkle.... This is great fun for Austen fans who like a little mystery with their manners.”— Rocky Mountain News Informationen zum Autor Stephanie Barron is the author of eight previous Jane Austen mysteries. She lives in Colorado, where she is at work on the next Jane Austen mystery. Klappentext In her latest spellbinding escapade, Jane Austen arrives in London to watch over the printing of her first novel, and finds herself embroiled in a crime that could end more than her career. For it is up to Jane to tease a murderer out of the ton, lest she—and her country—suffer a dastardly demise.... On the heels of completing Sense and Sensibility, Jane heads to Sloane Street for a monthlong visit with her brother Henry and his wife, Eliza. Hobnobbing with the Fashionable Great at the height of the Season, Jane is well aware of their secrets and peccadilloes. But even she is surprised when the intimate correspondence between a Russian princess and a prominent Tory minister is published in the papers for all to see. More shocking, the disgraced beauty is soon found with her throat slit on Lord Castlereagh's very doorstep. Everyone who's anyone in high society is certain the spurned princess committed the violence upon herself. But Jane is unconvinced. Nor does she believe the minister guilty of so grisly and public a crime. Jane, however, is willing to let someone else investigate—until a quirk of fate thrusts her and Eliza into the heart of the case...as prime suspects! Striking a bargain with the authorities, Jane secures seven days to save herself and Eliza from hanging. But as her quest to unmask a killer takes her from the halls of government to the drawing rooms of London's most celebrated courtesan, only one thing is sure: her failure will not only cut short her life. It could lead to England's downfall. A compulsively readable, uncommonly elegant novel of historical suspense, Jane and the Barque of Frailty once again proves Jane Austen a sleuth to be reckoned with. Leseprobe Chapter One   A Night Among the Ton  No. 64 Sloane Street, London Monday, 22 April 1811 CONCEIVE, IF YOU WILL, OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, COVENT Garden, on an evening such as this: the celebrated Mrs. Siddons being rumoured to appear, after too many months' absence from the stage; the play Macbeth, with all the hideous power of Shakespeare's verse and Sarah Siddons's art; and the Polite World of London brawling in the midst of Bow Street, in an effort to reach its place in the box before the curtain should rise. Such a welter of chairmen, link boys, fashionable carriages, street sweeps, porters, and coachmen! Such oaths, blasted into the ears of delicately-nurtured females, carried hurriedly to the paving lest their satin slippers should be soiled in the horses' dung! Such an array of silks and muslins, turbans and feathers, embroidered shawls and jewelled flounces! The scent of a thousand flowers on the air, the odour of tobacco and ripe oranges and fish from the markets in Covent Garden, the great theatre's windows thrown open against the warmth of the spring night and the heat of too many bodies filling the vast hall! The flickering of wax candles, a fortune's worth thrown up into the gleaming chandeliers; the rising pitch of conversation, the high screech of a woman's laughter, the impropriety of a chance remark, the hand of a gentleman resting where it should not, on the person of his lady—all this, like a prodigal feast spread out for my delectation. The vague shadow, too, of a Bow Street Runner lounging in the doorway of the magistrate's offices opposite—which I chanced...

Product details

• Authors: Stephanie Barron
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 30.10.2007
• EAN: 9780553584080
• ISBN: 978-0-553-58408-0
• No. of pages: 368
• Dimensions: 105 mm x 175 mm x 25 mm
• Series: Jane Austen Mysteries; Being A Jane Austen Mystery; Being A Jane Austen Mystery
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature