January 2014 Bookgroup book choice

Our January 2014 book choice is Death comes to Pemberley by P.D. James. Here is what the NY Times had to say about this prolific and well respected writer of mysteries.

The story is set in 1803, six years after “Pride and Prejudice” was finished (though it wasn’t published until 1813) and presumably when the marriage of Elizabeth and Darcy took place. They have two young sons now, and the arrival of a third child is shortly to be announced. But their tranquillity is interrupted one wet and windy evening when an unexpected carriage comes rocketing up the drive.

Inside is Elizabeth’s airhead sister Lydia, the one who eloped with the charming but unreliable George Wickham, screaming that her husband is dead. Actually he isn’t, though many, including Darcy, for whom Wickham is a constant source of embarrassment and irritation, might wish he were. A search party discovers Wickham in the woods, drunk and bloodstained, beside the body of his best friend, Captain Denny, and he babbles what sounds like a confession. But is Wickham, although a deadbeat and a serial seducer of young women, really a murderer? Even Darcy can’t quite believe that of him.

Ms. James, 91 and the author of 20 previous books, is the greatest living writer of British crime fiction, and probably that genre’s most talented practitioner ever. It’s hard to imagine any of her predecessors — like Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Julian Symons or even Agatha Christie, who for all her plotting skills was not much of a prose stylist — having the nerve to attempt an Austen sequel, let alone the ability to pull it off.

The style of “Death Comes to Pemberley” is a loose approximation of 19th-century prose, a sort of modern equivalent, rather than a painstaking imitation. But it’s more than convincing and every now and then, as a kind of homage or reminder, hits the precise, epigrammatic Austen note.

Ms. James cleverly weaves in references to both “Emma” and “Persuasion” in a way that expands the world of her novel, and “Death Comes to Pemberley” also has a descriptive density greater than any of Austen’s books. Austen could take the 19th century, its customs and culture, for granted. Ms. James very satisfyingly recreates them.