A MOST AGREEABLE MURDER

A young woman of marriageable age and prospects moonlights as a detective in Seales’ tongue-in-cheek Regency murder mystery.

Beatrice Steele spends hours in her turret room, dreaming of solving dark and dire crimes like her favorite “gentleman detective,” Sir Huxley. As the oldest daughter in a family of girls, she would usually be the one on whom all hopes were pinned to make a good match, but luckily, her sister Louisa is the beautiful one and, as such, may be the one to keep the family out of ruin. When they are invited to the annual autumn ball at Stabmort Park, home of the Ashbrooks—the oldest and wealthiest family in their corner of Swampshire—they have no idea that the storm that ushers them across the moors is also blowing together an unlikely cast of characters. By the end of the evening, secrets will have been revealed, false identities exposed, missing persons found, and murder committed (twice!). The character types are endearingly familiar to anyone who has ever read a Jane Austen novel, and the dialogue crackles with wit, outrage, subtext, and pluck. Beatrice, a true Sherlock Holmes within her restrictive social world, is a delight, and while the characters may be familiar, Seales’ over-the-top caricatures succeed in being humorous rather than cliché. As Seales writes about the Regency period in a readers guide at the end of the book: “Women learned to interpret every look, every word, every tiny insight they observed. If they were so good at doing this in order to catch a husband…what if they turned these skills toward catching a killer?” The result is a deliciously dark delve into a world that seems genteel on the surface and teems with sex and violence and greed just underneath—not so unlike Austen’s but with a morbid, rather than domestic, bent.

Irreverent, satirical, and oh so much fun!