*NEW RELEASE SPECIAL* Review of NETGALLEY arc Miss Austen Investigates: The Hapless Milliner – Book 1 of the Miss Austen Investigates series by Jessica Bull #BrainfluffNETGALLEYbookreview #MissAustenInvestigatesbookreview

I’ve been reading a fair few historical murder mystery series recently – see my review of The Nubian’s Curse – so when this one popped up on the Netgalley dashboard, I immediately requested it. After all, a Regency murder mystery featuring the great Jane Austen? It sounds just up my alley.

BLURB: Jane Austen—sparkling, spirited, and incredibly clever—is suddenly thrust into a mystery when a milliner’s dead body is found locked inside a cupboard in the middle of a ball. When Jane’s brother Georgie is found with some jewelry belonging to the deceased, the local officials see it as an open-and-shut case: one which is likely to end with his death. Jane is certain that he is innocent, and there is more to the murder than meets the eye.

Her investigations send her on a journey through local society, as Jane’s suspect list keeps on growing— and her keen observational skills of people will be put to the test to solve the crime and save her brother.

REVIEW: I was expecting a cooler, smarter Jane Austen. Instead, we’re treated to a real scatterbrain – someone who finds it difficult to think clearly unless she writes everything down. While she clearly has a clever wit and a sparkling personality, she is also hot-headed, impetuous and inclined to let her tongue run away with her, often hurtfully. Think of Emma, but more so. I’ll be honest, while I thought the plotting and pacing of the whodunit was done extremely well, I struggled to line up this much sillier, immature version with the person responsible for some of the cleverest, witty novels in the English language.

Yes, she’s only nineteen. But she’s also the daughter of a country parson at a time when many of her contemporaries were already married and bearing children. Furthermore, working-class young women of her age had been out earning a living for at least six years, maybe longer. People grew up fast in those days – they had to. While I’m prepared to concede that she might have prattled away in letters to siblings as if she didn’t have a serious thought in her head – I don’t believe she would have behaved in such a manner. And her flirtation with Tom Lefroy is plain reckless – if they’d been discovered in the greenhouse together, her reputation as a respectable unmarried woman would have been ruined even in the more lenient Georgian era. The fact that none of Jane’s heroines behaved so freely says it all.

Despite this grizzle – for which I’ve deducted a point – I wasn’t ever tempted to DNF this offering. For all my quibbles regarding Bull’s depiction of Jane, the rest of the period details and scene setting appears spot on and the Austen family dynamic worked well. As for the murder mystery, Jane’s habit of accusing the wrong person meant there were plenty of credible suspects so that I didn’t guess whodunit until the denouement. There was also an intriguing and poignant twist. Overall, I highly recommend this entertaining read and look forward to the next slice of Jane’s adventures. While I obtained an arc of Miss Austen Investigates from the publisher via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
8/10