This charming cozy featuring Phaedra Brighton hits almost every important cozy note: a bread and breakfast; a Jane Austen weekend; an aunt in trouble; a single woman in search of love; bookstore owning parents; a haughty cat; and an adorable small town. As the book opens, Phaedra is alarmed that her aunt is thinking of selling the beloved B & B Phaedra has viewed as a second home. She pleads with her aunt who argues back that business is down, and so Phaedra plans (almost on the fly) a Jane Austen weekend.
One of the weekend highlights will be the attendance of a well known romance writer, Harriet Overton. The weekend is based on Austen’s novel Persuasion – all the attendees are assigned one of the characters from the novel and encouraged to dress in period costume, and participate in Austen-y events like archery, tea, watercolors, and a night-time carriage ride. The B & B is fully booked and it seems like the week will be a success, but Harriet proves to be not only a meticulous and picky Austen-ite, she’s also a bully, terrorizing her husband and several of the other guests.
Harriet is so unpleasant, in fact, that of course she’s murdered (in a very Jane Austen type manner), and the hunt for the killer is on. There are a wealth of suspects to choose from, and Oliver deftly keeps the characters crisp and separate, so the reader remembers them. This is not something all writers are good at, in my opinion, and I appreciated it here.
While this is themed around Persuasion, Phaedra’s love life is very much Pride and Prejudice, with the part of Mr. Darcy being played by a local Shakespeare scholar. He and Phaedra teach at the same university. She’s also beset by other admirers – an old flame who turns up unexpectedly and the local police detective. Her fellow professor gets into a misunderstanding with Phaedra about her sister’s love life, and she misjudges his intentions (sound familiar?) These are successful tropes for a reason, and they work for this story just as they worked for Jane Austen all those years ago.
While I was annoyed that Phaedra did in fact venture alone towards literally a dark cabin in the woods, I will say that while I thought I had the ending figured out, I was ultimately surprised by the killer’s identity. This was a pleasant and fun read, with a good variety of characters and situations, and I loved that Phaedra has a cat named Wickham. The book is filled not only with Austen call outs and details, but it’s infused with the author’s obvious love and reverence for her as well. And that’s something I can totally get behind