Jane Austen at Home

 Lucy Worsley admits to being a Janite, so her biography of Austen is written from a fan's perspective. Worsley is also from the "warts and all" school of historians, so she's not afraid to delve into the family feuds and societal divisions that made up Jane's family. Quiet, observant, acid-penned Jane then crafted her narrow worlds into six near perfect novels.

The Austens were near-gentry; her clergyman father associated with those above him socially but her mother had to be hands on in the garden and dairy. Children were not seen as sentimentally as a generation or two later and all eight siblings were sent out for a few years and her disabled brother (he most likely had epilepsy) never returned.

Jane also grew up in a world of extended families with great differences in wealth and status. Her mother's brother married up, but never shared his wealth (as the Gardiners appear to, or were expected to by Mrs. Bennett) thanks to a parsimonious wife scandalously accused of shoplifting. One of Jane's brothers, Edward, was adopted by childless relations and settled in as a lord of the manor. Two brothers made their fortune (like Admiral Croft, Captain Wentworth, and William Price) in the Royal Navy, and James Austen succeeded his father s rector of Stevenson. Then there was Henry, who both rose and fell as a private banker who eventually went bankrupt. Married to his cousin Eliza, the scandalous widow of a French nobleman and the illegitimate daughter of Mr. Austen's sister Philadelphia, he was Jane's literary agent and supporter but also a bit of schemer and a partial model for Henry Crawford. As unmarried women, Jane's and Cassandra's fates rose and fell with those of their brothers, depending on Edward's grace and favor lodge (in unofficial exchange for child care) after their father had died.

What about her writing? Worsley disagrees with the theory the Jane only wrote when she had a "home" in Stevenson and Chwton. While she wrote the first drafts of three novels before her father gave up Stevenson and three after being published in 1811, it's likely that she was revising and rewriting the manuscripts that would become Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice while moving among rental lodgings in Bath and Southampton. We don't realize that because of class and era. Jane was a Georgian, product of an era where woman's work was necessary. Her first biographers were her brother Edward's wealthy and Victorain descendants who felt that seeing Dear Aunt Jane as a professional would be insulting.

Worsley also explores Jane's romantic life. She had one known thwarted romance and turned down one proposal. Jane Austen at Home mentions another potential suitor, an associate of Henry Austen's who never got up the nerve to ask, and a few unnamed men with whom she danced and flirted. In the end, Jane chose a career and a life among women, living with her mother and sister and with sisters by choice like Martha Lloyd (who lived with the Austen women as sort of a regency Golden Girls) and the Biggs sisters (one widowed, one thrown out by her brother, Jane's almost-fiance). Creativity or childbirths -one of the few women able to make that choice. To be honest, it probably wasn't entirely hers because she was dowry less in an era with a war-created shortage of eligible men. But unlike Marianne Dashwood and (at least in my opinion) Emma Woodhouse, she never had to settle.

Death and the Chapman

When Kate Sedley completed her series with The Christmas Wassail, I decided it was time to return to the start of the series. Roger changed quite a bit over the 12 or 13 year timeline of his books. In December 1483, Roger Chapman is married with four children with Bristol as his home base and a reputation for aiding Richard III. That's a far cry from 19-year-old Roger Carverson who recently left Glastonbury Abbey knowing that monastic life wasn't for him. That Roger is bright and curious but somewhat naive. Naive, but tall and handsome and it's his attractiveness that brings him to the attention of Alderman Weaver's housekeeper/cousin and to Lady Mallory's servant Bess. Relatives of both Alderman Weaver and Lady Mallory disappeared from the same street in London and both want Roger to find out what happened, which he does. 28 years after my first reading, I'd forgotten this main mystery in favor of the subplot which brings Roger in contact with the Duke of Gloucester and his spymaster, Timothy Plummer. While chasing a false lead in the disappearances, Roger finds out where Anne Neville had been hidden in an attempt to prevent her marriage to Richard. I have hundreds of books (read and unread) on my shelves, but I'm going to make time to revisit Roger's travels.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius

 In the Shadow of Vesuvius brings Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily, along with her childhood friends Ivy Brandon and Jeremy, Duke of Bainbridge, to an archaeological dig in 1901 Pompeii. As so often happens, they come across a much more recently deceased body and find that most of the archeological expedition (including a brother and sister team - she's the archaeologist and he's an artist who draws the uncovered artifacts - the head archaeologist, and the man financing it) are hiding secrets. Another more personal secret turns up as well, in the form of Emily's husband Colin's previously unknown daughter. Fighting jealousy and the feelings of inadequacy Colin's late lover induced in her years ago, Emily eventually uncovers the truth, and saves herself with the aid of a knife carried by the young woman poet whose life in Pompeii shortly before Vesuvius destroyed the city.

In a Dark House

 Sometimes, a mystery novel has too much plot. That's my opinion of Deborah Crombie's In a Dark House but I still found it entertaining. The book starts with a young firefighter chatting with her colleague before they're called out on an arson fire. You can feel their friendship and romantic potential, so it's not a surprise when he dies during the fire. He's not the only casualty - there's a woman's body on the ground floor - and Duncan Kincaid leads the police investigation. Meanwhile, Duncan's cousin, a Cambridge based vicar who's covering for one of her colleagues, asks Gemma James to come along on a welfare check of one of her parishoners. Fanny Liu is a former nurse now disabled by Guillaume-Beret and her flatmate, who also helps her with daily activities has disappeared. There's also a missing child case and a murder connected to the battered women's shelter adjacent to the fire site, and all plots end up being at least loosely connected. It's not the best mystery I've read, but Crombie's characters are engaging and feel like real people and each individual solution is well supported. In a Dark House is a bit too convoluted to be a good mystery but it works as a novel.

Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System

 I loved Quincy. I still do - one advantage of working from home has been the chance to watch it over lunch. 70s fashion, Quincy jumping up on his soapbox - and scientific crime investigation. It turns out that most techniques (even fingerprints) range from "more art than science" to "totally false." Entertaining, but ineffective at best, and putting the wrong people behind bars (or into the execution chamber) all too often.

M. Chris Fabricant, an attorney with the Innocence Project, details the convictions and exonerations of three men in Junk Science. All three were convicted on the basis of bite marks. They're inherently unreliable evidence (as any older sibling of a biter can tell you, two bites from the same person are not identical, let alone distinctive), and one particular "expert" invented a method of "finding" bite marks to match to previously identified suspects. Beyond the injustice done to these three men, there's the fact that in at least one case, the actual criminal committed additional serious crimes while the scapegoat was in prison.

While his stories were interesting, Fabricant could have used a better editor. He jumps between cases, adding in personal information about his case preparations, without much warning and without an index that would let the reader refresh their memory about the details of each case. Junk Science is worth reading if you're interested in the subject, but likely too frustrating to get through if you're not.

The Case of the Reincarnated Client

 Hardboiled mysteries focus on the dark side. What non-mystery readers don't appreciate is that even lightweight mysteries and procedurals have dark threads. After all, they're focused on a crime, often murder. My favorite Christie, Sparkling Cyanide doesn't just include multiple murders but the whole plot would not exist if not for women barely out of their teens marrying rich men over 30. Tarquin Hall's Vish Puri novels are generally on the lighter side but the Delhi-based detective has dealt with serious issues before. The main plot The Case of the Reincarnated Client is by far his darkest.

Puri reluctantly gives in to Mummy-ji's nagging and takes on the case of a woman who claims to be the reincarnation of one of the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. This sends Puri back into that violent time and explores mattes of prejudice, police corruption, abandoned widows, and domestic abuse. It's a case where we see that solving the crime will have a minimal effect at best on those who were harmed.

The subplots, fortunately, lighten up the novel. There's Puri's other case - he'd done a background check on a prospective groom who turns out to be a prodigious snorer, so loud his new wife can't sleep with him - and the administrative chaos brought about by the November, 2016 demonetization. And there's the destruction of Puri's beloved Ambassador and the desire of everyone around him - his driver Handbrake, his wife Rumpi, and Mummy-Ji - for him to finally replace the not-as-reliable-as-he-claims, past-its-prime sedan with something that has power steering and heated seats. A thread which resolves on the last page, along with Puri's reluctance to accept that his younger daughter wants to make a love match.

Elizabeth of York

 I didn't realize how long it had been since I'd read one of Alison Weir's biographies. While I've read a few since starting this blog, that coincided with her move to historical fiction which I've devoured. As with her biographies of Mary Boleyn and Katherine Swynford, Weir has to work around the relative lack of sources directly related to Henry VII's Queen. Women didn't appear in most historical records and it was Elizabeth's daughters-in-law and granddaughters who were literate and in most cases highly educated so we don't have Elizabeth's letters or diaries.

Elizabeth was the oldest of the Duke of York's ten children, one of seven sisters who could expect to be married off to secure alliances. Instead, she spent several years in sanctuary while her father and uncles fought what was later named the Wars of the Roses, eventually seeing her uncle Richard usurp the throne and most likely order the murder of her two brothers. Growing up under those circumstances, it makes sense that Elizabeth would be politically savvy, and Weir presents evidence that marriages to both a pre-invasion Henry Tudor and to a post-usurpation Richard III were considered. The alleged alliance with her uncle could be why Elizabeth's marriage to Henry was delayed - he wanted to make sure that the woman he was marrying to legitimize his claim to the throne was not allied to his vanquished opponent.

Beyond the political intrigue in which she appeared to play a role by not committing until it was necessary, Elizabeth's life was ordinary for a woman of her status. She supported charities, was known to be devout, and delivered seven children, four of whom survived to adulthood and one of whom became Henry VIII, before dying in childbirth at age 39, most likely attempting to produce another "spare." As with many of Weir's biographies, I found Elizabeth of York an interesting view into the life of the Tudor court.

The End of White Christian America

The End of White Christian America feels like a policy paper, which isn't surprising since its written by a think tank leader.  It's a good primer on the rise of fundamentalism as general protestantism declined and backs everything up with graphs and charts. It was interesting, but there's really not much to say about it.

Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight

 There's not much to say about Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight. Stephanie Plum was never deep and Janet Evanovich has been churning out amusing but surface mysteries for the past decade plus. This time, Steph is joined by Diesel, the semi-supernatural hunter who (literally) popped into the holiday themed between-the-numbers books. They're both hunting for a hacker named Oswald Wednesday who, in turn, is killing off the Baked Potatoes, a local (mostly white-hat) hacker group. Take a scene of Grandma Mazur at a funeral. Add in Lula having hairdresser problems after encountering a bat, an appearance by Uncle Sandor's baby-blue Buick, Baked Potatoes in protective custody at Rangeman, and Stephanie's mother discoverer the zen of knitting. Tie the threads together with an action rescue, and you've got a middling Plum. Entertaining enough to make me eager for the next installment but not particularly memorable.