We loved the first book in this series, and loved how this one ties into the Longbourn law firm by the end!
In case you're not familiar with Austen's original Dashwood family romance, let me lay it out for you: Sense is Marianne, moved by her emotions, which she wears on her sleeve, society-be-darned, and follows her heart (thus getting hurt). While Sensibility is Elinor, who holds her emotions in check and thinks with her head, cool and unflappable under pressure, frustratingly so at times, but in others it works wonderfully well for her.
So in this re-write of the Austen classic, Marianne is the intrepid investigator, following her "gut" hunches, and lets her emotions, as it pertains to the slime-ball Willoughby, get the better of her judgement. While Elinor is the analyst, watching how others behave and interact, pining away for Edward but unwilling to say (or believe) anything other than the sort of small-ish things he demonstrates / says to her in proper society.
The premise: the Dashwood family of all girls is put out of their house by an entail when their father dies. The entail means the house and estate can only go the Dashhwood male heir, who is John, son of the girls' first mother (deceased) and their father.
When John and his wife Franny show up to claim what's now theirs, Mrs. Dashwood (the widow) leaves and installs them in a tiny apartment on Barton Street in London. John, at Franny's urging, impoverishes the women with a ridiculously tiny inheritance.
The girls have got to… work.
What an unfathomable step down in society!
Elinor takes what few skills but keen interest she has in chemistry and embarks on the stinky enterprise of making perfumes. She fails, repeatedly.
Marianne wants to be a detective, and failing that, an investigator. She was on the cusp of asking her father about working for him, when he died.
Which was kind of odd. His death. Elinor's already thinking it, although she hasn't said it. What tipped her off? There's a cup of tea next to her father, who never took tea in his study. And in the bottom of the cup is a dried, powdery substance.
Marianne is the first to voice their suspicions: What if their father's death – he's found dead in his study chair by Elinor, who notes the window was open – wasn't natural after all? What if…gasp! It was murder?
But how, and why?
Mr. Dashwood is the proprietor of his own investigation firm, Norland and Company. Perhaps one of his prior investigations holds a clue? A previous client, per chance?
Elinor decides to study the substance at the bottom of the cup. It may hold the key to their father's death.
Meanwhile, their mother is increasingly dependent on Laudanum to get to sleep every night, using it "soothe her nerves" after their father's death.
Laudanum is made from opium, a highly addictive drug, although the Dashwoods don't figure that out for a while.
I won't ruin any of the murder mystery, or who dun it. And of course, we all know how the romance unfolds, but I won't spoil how this one does, specifically. It's a satisfying second-pass at the Austen classic.
Enjoy the read and the mystery! I can't wait to read the next.
In this latest cozy installment, Myrtle has the most urgent of motivations for solving the murder – keeping her father safe while hospitalized for tonsilitis surgery.
To explain: her father's tonsils are red and inflamed, keeping him from speaking and thus working / investigating a case. As the lawyer for the Snowcroft family, it's his responsibility to investigate the latest heiress to come forward claiming the hefty inheritance that includes land a railroad company wants to lay tracks through. She's a girl Myrtle's age, Emily, from the Australian outback, who wants to find out if she really is a survivor of the shipwreck that killed her father, the captain of the boat. She could also be a pretender, a fake, a fraud. However likable she is, it's a distressing possibility that demands investigation.
But Myrtle's father's tonsils have to come out before he can get to the bottom of any of that. Now, today this is a relatively routine surgery. You're in, you're out, all in one day. Not so in Myrtle's time. It was a week-long stay in the hospital, and it's when her father witnesses a murder. Of a bald man. Through the window in a room across from his hotel bed. Strangely enough, there's no body to be found at all.
But the implications of a murder in the hospital mean her father's in danger, as an eye witness to the murder. Even if his nurse and doctor just think he's had a bad reaction to the anesthesia (again, not the kind of anesthesia we'd administer in a surgery today, which is important to note).
And once Myrtle finds the body, and starts to unravel how the murder relates to the Snowcroft case, well… all I'll say is enjoy! We love this middle grade sleuth and look forward to more of her mystery solving adventures!
