A Fortune Most Fatal (Miss Austen Investigates #2)

A family’s harsh demands set the stage for an inquiry about an accused fraudster in Bull’s long-winded latest to feature Jane Austen as a sleuth (after The Hapless Milliner). Aspiring novelist Jane, 21, is pressured by her sister-in-law, Elizabeth, to travel to Kent in the weeks before Elizabeth gives birth to a fourth child. Neddy, Elizabeth’s husband and Jane’s brother, was adopted as a boy by a childless rich couple, the Knights, so that he could serve as their heir. Now, the widowed Mrs. Knight has a young woman staying with her who claims to be a shipwrecked foreign princess. Elizabeth and Neddy worry that “Princess Eleanor” will steal their fortune, so they order Jane to ingratiate herself with Mrs. Knight and find out the guest’s true identity. Elizabeth is ruthlessly cruel to Jane, dismissing her love of fiction and insisting she find a suitable man to marry so she doesn’t siphon from Neddy’s inheritance. That dynamic, while historically plausible, drains Jane’s investigation of emotional stakes, and Bull’s overloading the narrative with red herrings doesn’t help matters. As a social analysis of late-18th-century England, this fascinates, but as a mystery, it falls flat. (Mar.)