MISS CAROLINE BINGLEY, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

After 212 years, the sister of Elizabeth Bennet’s brother-in-law gets her chance to shine in a most unexpected role.

Not that the title is entirely accurate. Caroline Bingley, the wealthy and forceful sister of Charles Bingley, who married Lizzie’s sister Jane, is roused to action when Georgiana Darcy, the younger sister of Lizzie’s husband, leaves Derbyshire for London with hardly a word of explanation. Following her trail with the help of Gordon, her remarkably versatile butler, Caroline soon finds Georgiana and learns that she took off abruptly in pursuit of Jade, her missing maid. Jade, an Indian woman whose birth name is Jayani, isn’t much harder to locate than Georgiana, but the circumstances of this discovery are dire. Caroline finds her in a questionable rooming house bending over her brother, Sameer, who’s been stabbed to death. Police Magistrate Pickersgill naturally assumes that the servant killed her brother, but Georgiana can’t believe that Jade would do such a thing, so Caroline, focusing on the aristocratic Dunston family, who’d employed Sameer as a footman, resolves to unmask the real murderer, her own suspicions quickened by the Dunstons’ unwillingness to say anything about their connection to him. Gardiner and Kumar’s Regency prose deals resourcefully with matters far more sinister and violent than anything in Jane Austen. But fans of Pride and Prejudice had better revel in the authors’ portraits of Georgiana, Charles (who vanishes after the opening chapter), and Caroline, since no other characters from Austen return in this period whodunit.

The heroine is better described as a meddling busybody than a private investigator. But wait for the broadly implied sequel.