A BOOK WORTH READING

I have long taken great delight in a really good Christmas book. The problem is finding one! Especially since every hack and her dog have taken to churning them out. So, imagine my surprise when I stumbled across this one at our own little library, and it managed to suck me into its imaginary world within the first few pages...

a world where none other than Jane Austen herself just happens to be the main character, and the people-observing skills she has developed over the years, through her writing, have also given her a knack for political intrigue, crime detection, and even solving the occasional murder! This latest book, in a whole series of Jane Austin mysteries, just happens to be set at Christmas time in the year 1814, at the home of a politically prominent family. Napoleon has been banished to Elba, the Treaty of Ghent has been signed by John Quincy Adams, ending the threat of a war with those pesky colonies, and England is in a celebratory mood -- until the courier delivering the treaty to its destination gets murdered and the treaty disappears!

Author Stephanie Barron had quite the interesting career path herself. Born in New York, the last of six girls (perhaps the thing that drew her to Austen in the first place?) she attended Princeton and Stanford, where she studied history, before going on to work as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later.

I ask you, is there anything better than discovering a delightful new book series that already has at least a dozen books in it? I think not!