Well, that event is over but SR is not, as I will explain by the end of this post. First things first, my last entry in Triple Play is Jane and the Barque of Frailty by Stephanie Barron, which catches me throughly up with the Jane Austen Mystery books (at least until the finale is released this fall).
Here, we stay with Jane in London as she is proofreading her about to be published first novel, Sense and Sensibility. She is the guest of her banker brother Henry and his wife Eliza, a former French countess who is rather ditzy at times but very loving towards her sister in law.
During her visit, Jane goes to the theatre where a recently notorious figure is noticeable in the audience. A Russian princess sitting alone, whose secret love letters to powerful and married nobleman Lord Castlereagh were published in a major newspaper causing all sorts of scandalous talk.
Despite such shocking news, Jane cannot help but feel a touch of sympathy towards this young woman who was perhaps lead astray in love, much like Marianne Dashwood in her nearly ready for publication novel:
It is even more shocking to learn the next morning that the Princess has been discovered dead on the doorstep of her supposed paramour, her throat slashed. Since Lord Castlereagh’s residence is within the section of town where Henry and Eliza live, this gruesome demise feels too close for comfort.
Jane becomes more involved in this case than expected as Eliza enlists her aid in selling some jewels for one of her friends who expects her husband to divorce her in favor of a much younger woman.
As it turns out, those jewels were the property of the late Princess and the Austen house is visited by the infamous Bow Street Runners, an unofficial police force whose capture rate is rather steady regardless of the true guilt or innocence of the parties in question.
In order to save Eliza and herself from serious criminal suspicion, Jane must mount her own investigation before the week is out or the two of them could face some deadly consequences to be sure:
While seeking answers, Jane endeavors to keep Henry fully out of this particular loop but must include a few others into this situation such as Sylvester Chizzlewit, a young lawyer who is protecting her inheritance of papers from the late Lord Harold and Julia Radcliffe, who is the Barque of the title.
So as I was going over my next set of books for this challenge, I realized that there were five titles in Rhys Bowen’s Her Royal Spyness series on my TBR that needed to be read and deserved their own separate listing.
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