Bantam (first), 1998
“The actress’s magnificent form limned itself on the paving stones at my feet, like an enchantress materialising out of the common snow and dirt, and I knew her immediately for a woman any man might die to possess.” Surely Jane Austen would not have described a glimpse of a shadow in these grandiloquent terms. But though Stephanie Barron cannot approach the style and talent of her protagonist, in presenting her readers with Austen-as-sleuth she is on to a very good thing. In the third mystery in this series, a guest at a masquerade ball is stabbed just as a Shakespearean actor is declaiming lines from Macbeth – if it were done when ’tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly. On the victim’s body, near the wound, there is found a pendant on a gold chain – within it, the portrait of an eye! Eye portraiture, we are told, was in vogue in Austen’s time, and was a means for some – including the dissolute Prince Regent – to carry with them always one fragment of the image of a clandestine lover. High drama reaches an elegant denouement when evildoers are trapped into confession through a game of verbal charades: “My first has the making of honey to charm, My second brings breakfast to bed on your arm. My third bores a hole in leather so fine, While united the whole breaks a heart most unkind!” No betrayal of our interest here: Jane and The Wandering Eye is an erudite diversion. (Jeanne M. Jacobson)
Originally published in Issue # 152 – January/February 1998
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