From the publisher: "A summer house party turns into a thrilling whodunit when Jane Austen's Mr. Wickham—one of literature's most notorious villains—meets a sudden and suspicious end in this brilliantly imagined mystery featuring Austen’s leading literary characters. The happily married Mr. Knightley and Emma are throwing a party at their country estate, bringing together distant relatives and new acquaintances—characters beloved by Jane Austen fans. Definitely not invited is Mr. Wickham, whose latest financial scheme has netted him an even broader array of enemies. As tempers flare and secrets are revealed, it's clear that everyone would be happier if Mr. Wickham got his comeuppance. Yet they’re all shocked when Wickham turns up murdered—except, of course, for the killer hidden in their midst. Nearly everyone at the house party is a suspect, so it falls to the party’s two youngest guests to solve the mystery... In this tantalizing fusion of Austen and Christie, the unlikely pair must put aside their own poor first impressions and uncover the guilty party—before an innocent person is sentenced to hang."

I loved The Murder of Mr. Wickham, and was excited to hear the series continues with this second installment. (This new entry stands alone—though the perpetrator of Book 1’s crime is referenced in the opening pages.) Jonathan Darcy (son of Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam) and Juliet Tilney (daughter of Catherine and Henry) seek to investigate the sudden death of Mr. Willoughby's unhappy wife, formerly Miss Sophia Grey, who suffers a very public death by poisoning at a dinner party at Barton Park hosted by Sir John Middleton. The premise—that all the characters in Austen's six major works are somehow all in each other's social orbits—continues to be audacious, but this book is such good fun for Austen fans and mystery lovers. For fans of P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley and Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders.