What Happened on Box Hill: Book One of the Austen University Mysteries

Gilliland puts her expertise on Jane Austen, the subject of her doctoral dissertation, to amusing use in this promising series launch set at Louisiana’s Austen University, where many of the staff and students have names that will be familiar to Austen readers. Caty Moreland, a true-crime podcast addict, who shares the name of the protagonist of Northanger Abbey, and her roommate, Isabella Thorpe, are scheduled to be initiated into a sorority. Instead, Isabella disappears, and Caty stumbles across her corpse. Caty dismisses the university’s position that Isabella died from an accidental fall and sets out to find the truth. Gilliland has fun with the conventions of the closed-circle mystery, setting key scenes at a fancy three-course dinner to which all her suspects have been invited. The idea of modern versions of Austen’s heroines joining forces to solve a murder is a clever one and is likely substantial enough to sustain several sequels. Admirers of other mysteries combining Austen’s characters with whodunits plots such as Claudia Gray’s The Murder of Mr. Wickham will be entertained. (Self-published)