Miss Austen Investigates

November 20, 2023
A 20-year-old Jane Austen unexpectedly becomes an amateur sleuth to clear her brother’s name in Bull’s imaginative debut and series launch. Budding novelist Jane attends a ball at the opulent home of Lord John Harcourt, where she expects dashing Irishman Tom Lefroy to offer her his hand in marriage. Before Lefroy can bend a knee, however, one of Harcourt’s housemaids finds the body of a young woman in the laundry closet, and the festivities come to a halt. Jane recognizes the victim as Madame Renault, a milliner who’d sold her a hat a few days earlier. The expensive necklace Renault was wearing before her death is missing from her corpse, so the local magistrate surmises that vagabonds used the ball as cover to steal Madame Renault’s necklace and leave her for dead. When the jewelry turns up in the pocket of Jane’s nonverbal older brother Georgie, he’s swiftly arrested and charged with theft and murder. With Georgie unable to defend himself and Jane convinced of his innocence, she enlists the help of her close-knit family to find the killer before her brother is hanged. Bull’s Jane is an endearingly clumsy detective, equal parts clever and impulsive, and the investigation contains the kind of high stakes that similar breezy historicals often lack. This series seems destined for a long run.

February 17, 2025
A family’s harsh demands set the stage for an inquiry about an accused fraudster in Bull’s long-winded latest to feature Jane Austen as a sleuth (after The Hapless Milliner). Aspiring novelist Jane, 21, is pressured by her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, to travel to Kent in the weeks before Elizabeth gives birth to a fourth child. Neddy, Elizabeth’s husband and Jane’s brother, was adopted as a boy by a childless rich couple, the Knights, so that he could serve as their heir. Now, the widowed Mrs. Knight has a young woman staying with her who claims to be a shipwrecked foreign princess. Elizabeth and Neddy worry that “Princess Eleanor” will steal their fortune, so they order Jane to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Knight and find out the guest’s true identity. Elizabeth is ruthlessly cruel to Jane, dismissing her love of fiction and insisting she find a suitable man to marry so she doesn’t siphon from Neddy’s inheritance. That dynamic, while historically plausible, drains Jane’s investigation of emotional stakes, and Bull’s overloading the narrative with red herrings doesn’t help matters. As a social analysis of late-18th-century England, this fascinates, but as a mystery, it falls flat.