Murder at Mansfield Park

Ever wondered what it would have been like if Jane Austen had turned her hand to murder?

Murder at Mansfield Park takes Austen's masterpiece and  turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha  Christie. Just as in many classic English detective mysteries, this new  novel opens with a group of characters in a country house setting, with  passions running high, and simmering tensions beneath the elegant  Regency surface. The arrival of the handsome and debonair Henry Crawford  and his sister forces these tensions into the open, and sparks a chain  of events that leads inexorably to violence and death.

Beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language in use at the time, Murder at Mansfield Park  is both a good old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader  guessing until the very last page, and a sparklingly clever inversion of  the original, which goes to the heart of many of the questions raised  by Jane Austen's text. Austen's Mansfield Park is radically  different from any of her other works, and much of the pleasure of Lynn  Shepherd's novel lies in the way it takes the characters and episodes in  the original, and turns them into a lighter, sharper, and more playful  book, with a new heroine at its centre - a heroine who owes far more to  the lively and spirited Elizabeth Bennet, than the dreary and insipid  Fanny Price.