Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor

I guess the book was... OK?! I kinda lost interest in it at about the 60% mark and scanned through the rest of it. The mystery was not very engaging, the twists were not super twisty, but I'll give it to the author that my initial guesses for the murderer were wrong.

I'm a huge fan of Jane Austen and also really enjoy classic British literature from that time period, so I'm not unfamiliar with how convoluted English writing could be from that era. However, the author dialed it up to 11 when she was trying to replicate that style. It felt overdone and stilted, and really screamed, “This is trying very hard to write like Jane Austen” rather than replicating her style.

The author seems to have a penchant for replacing a perfectly regular “had” for “did”.

Regular sentence: “Had she arrived in a Scargrave carriage, she would have caused a commotion.”Author's sentence: “Did she arrive in a Scargrave carriage, she would have caused a commotion.”

I'm not entirely sure if it's an accurate use, but even if so, she used it so many times that I actually got really annoyed with it after a bit.

None of the characters were particularly endearing, unfortunately not even our narrator Jane. As someone invested in finding out the solutions to the mystery, she jumps to a ton of conclusions and also gets led on super easily by the worst of characters. In fact, every plot twist that comes to her in the end takes her entirely by surprise. I get that she can't know too much, or it would be spoiling the twists for the reader, but then why even make her the “detective” of this series? I was also really annoyed that she was so resolutely confident in Fitzroy's innocence despite learning about his "misdeeds" in London and she gave no reason why besides that he was just oh so noble. I mean, even Isobel, his lover, was completely taken in and we are to believe that Jane wasn't simply because she had a gut feeling. It just felt like the author wanted Jane to be right in something in the end, rather than jumping on the hate bandwagon for Fitzroy only to have to be contrite about it when it's proven false.

There are definite P&P elements in the plot here, and frankly that was a little annoying too. As the author notes in the preface, First Impressions was written way before the time period of this book so it wouldn't make sense to say that, in an alternate universe, the events of this book inspired the events of P&P. Along with some iconic quotes directly lifted from P&P and attributed to some of the characters in this book, it just felt like a cheap homage to P&P. Don't get me wrong, I love P&P but don't shoehorn elements of it into something that's meant to be completely irrelevant. Don't copy and paste quotes from another novel and add it in here just so that we can all have a nudge nudge wink wink, I know that's from P&P moment. It's just a pet peeve for me as a Jane Austen fangirl.

I am also super bewildered by how Jane started off with a terrible impression of Tom Hearst, and despite writing about how she will guard her heart against him, etc., she suddenly feels betrayed when she finds out that he actually got Fanny pregnant. And then what shocks her even more than that is when she finds out that he's actually a wastrel who cheats at cards and has racked up gambling debts (obviously a Wickham prototype), it's only then that she starts thinking, how could I have been so deceived by him? Ummm. There was really nothing at all to even give us the impression that she had been deceived, or any reason why she would like him at all, as she persistently rebuffs all his advances. I don't know, this entire plot point was just so so contrived and unnecessary, and just made Jane look even more silly.