July 2010
On Sale: July 20, 2010
Featuring: Mary Crawford; Fanny Price
352 pages
ISBN: 0312638345
EAN: 9780312638344
Trade Size
$14.99
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Mystery Historical, Jane Austen
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Murder At Mansfield Park
by Lynn Shepherd
Complete with romance, intrigue, and crimes of the heart, MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK is an irreverent new twist on an old classic.
Murder at Mansfield Park takes Jane Austen’s masterpiece and turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha Christie. Just as in many classic English detective mysteries, this new novel opens with a group of characters in a country house setting, with passions running high, and simmering tensions beneath the elegant Regency surface. The arrival of the handsome and debonair Henry Crawford and his sister forces these tensions into the open, and sparks a chain of events that leads inexorably to violence and death.
Beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language in use at the time, Murder at Mansfield Park is both a good old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the very last page, and a sparklingly clever inversion of the original, which goes to the heart of many of the questions raised by Jane Austen’s text. Austen’s Mansfield Park is radically different from any of her other works, and much of the pleasure of Lynn Shepherd’s novel lies in the way it takes the characters and episodes in the original, and turns them into a lighter, sharper, and more playful book, with a new heroine at its centre – a heroine who owes far more to the lively and spirited Elizabeth Bennet, than the dreary and insipid Fanny Price.
A treat for Austen lovers and murder mystery aficionados alike.
Excerpt
Murder at Mansfield Park – an excerpt
There has been a gruesome murder at Mansfield, and in his father’s absence Tom Bertram has summoned a thief taker from London, to help solve the crime.
Now read on…
Mary sat for a few minutes deliberating whether it would be best to return to the parsonage; her sister must be wondering where she was. She was still debating the matter when she heard the sound of a carriage on the drive, and went to the window. It was a very handsome equipage, but the horses were post; and neither the carriage, nor the coachman who drove it, were familiar to her. The man who emerged was a little above medium height, with rather strong features and a visible scar above one eye. His clothes, however, were fashionable and of very Read More…
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