Jane and the Final Mystery is Stephanie Barron’s last mystery featuring Jane Austen as an amateur sleuth. You can check out the Webstore for that book and others in the series. Here’s the link to Stephanie Barron’s page if you’re looking for the books. https://bit.ly/3ZGk8ei.
Dana Stabenow recently reviewed Jane and the Final Mystery.
Being the fifteenth and final Jane Austen mystery by Stephanie Barron. A friend’s son, William Heathcote, enrolled at Winchester College and handicapped by a severe stammer, has been unjustly persecuted by person or persons unknown, up to and including being charged with a murder he did not commit.
Jane, laid low by what will be her final illness, nevertheless succumbs to the entreaties of her nephew Edward who is a friend of William’s and journeys from Chawton to Winchester to unravel this tangle, clear William’s name, and bring the true murderer to justice.
Which of course she does, for she is Jane. I will be forever grateful to Barron for flying in the face of reality and ending the series on a hopeful note.
It is not the London physician I had hoped to consult, when the prospect of a legacy remained to me; but it is something, indeed, to have a man of science back me.
Who knows, after all, what the future may hold?
In an alternate universe Jane lives on.
In the meantime, I now want to go back and reread all fifteen of Jane’s adventures, beginning with Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, where Jane and we first meet that Gentleman Rogue, Harold Trowbridge. My favorites include Jane and the Madness of Lord Byron where in interviewing Lord Byron Jane has a tiger by the tail, Jane and the Waterloo Map where Jane investigates a body in a library (I so loved writing that line), and Jane and the Year Without a Summer, where we see the last of the Hero, aka Raphael West.
But they’re all great reads, graced with Barron’s gift of being able to channel Jane’s personality and stile [sic, that’s how they spelled it then], her ability to interpolate lines from all of Jane’s works into the narrative she has created here, and the positive genius she displayed in creating a crime fiction series with Jane Austen as the detective in the first place. But who better? No one has ever been more adept at seeing right through the imperfections and conceits we all share, even if none of Jane’s commit murder to cover them up.