Conville & Walsh

Ever wondered what it would have been like if Jane Austen had turned her hand to murder? Wonder no more.

MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK takes the basic mise-en-scène of Austen‘s masterpiece and turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha Christie. Just as in their classic mysteries, MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK opens with a group of characters in an isolated 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.

Not only beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language and vocabulary in use at the time, the novel is at the same time a good old-fashioned well-plotted murder, and a sparklingly clever inversion of the original, which goes to the heart of many of the questions readers have asked themselves about Austen‘s text. MANSFIELD PARK is radically different from any other Austen work, and much of the pleasure of Lynn Shepherd‘s debut novel lies in the way it takes the characters, episodes, and relationships in the original, and turns them into a lighter, sharper, and more playful book, with a new heroine at its centre – a heroine who is far more in the mould of Emma or Elizabeth Bennett than the insipid Fanny Price ever was. A novel for Austen-lovers and murder-aficionados alike, MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK has something for everyone.