I was immediately intrigued by this book for several reasons:
*Fantastic title and cover
*Intriguing description of a murder mystery set in Jane Austen's England
*All the Jane Austen connections from characters to locations!

I absolutely loved having so many favorite Austen characters all under one roof. As a longtime Austen fan, I loved the chance to see what could happen if her characters met. What a delight to read about Elizabeth Darcy talking to Emma Knightley. Or Colonel Brandon and Captain Wentworth sharing a moment of military understanding. Or seeing how Mr Knightley and Mr Darcy both care for their younger siblings. Or how Fanny and Edmund Bertrum would interact with people quite different from themselves. Or the next generation of Austen inspired characters in Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney. I loved all the connections to the original stories and how the characters have progressed since their novels' ends. It was fun to see favorite Highbury characters like Miss Bates and even Frank Churchill. I felt that the essence of Austen's characters is very well maintained from Fanny Bertram's timidity to Anne Wentworth's observation to George Wickham's wickedness. While it's difficult to fully develop story arcs for all these characters, our author allows us glimpses into the lives and minds of some of Austen's most memorable characters.

The author transitions seamlessly between voices, and I enjoyed getting inside everyone's heads. I love books with multiple perspectives and this one does it so well! It's illuminating to read what Mr Darcy is thinking or Edmund Bertram's inner struggle or Marianne Brandon's personal dialogue. I felt the omniscient narrator was able to build well on the already established characters while giving new, dynamic characters as well. Watching Jonathan and Juliet work together to solve the mystery and understand each other was so engaging. I felt that I was alongside them looking for clues, seeking to  understand other people, and gaining wisdom and clarity. 

Throughout the novel, thrilling action leads us along the trail of suspects to a surprising climax. I do not read many murder mysteries. But I can certainly see the appeal after devouring this story. I couldn't turn pages fast enough as I followed the clues with our two young detectives trying to find the killer. There was a nice balance between the murder mystery and classic Jane Austen style. We learn about the quarrels, hardships, grief, pain, joy, and hopes of so many of these characters. Overall, those personal developments fit well into Austen's world. Only a few times did I feel like their problems burst the Regency bubble that Gray created (a few details felt more modern than Regency). The story got a bit slow for me in the middle, but the climax of the story was satisfying and surprising. I had worried that a favorite Austen character would be made out as a criminal as bad as Wickham himself. However, the killer and revelation of the murder were both revealed with poise. I finished the novel feeling delighted and content.

I really enjoyed getting lost in Gray's version of Austen's world. The characters are fantastic and feel like they just stepped off the page of Austen's novels. The action and mystery were exciting and surprising. An enjoyable delight for all Austen fans!

So enjoyed this book! I love how she brought so many of Jane Austen's characters into the story and connected them although because there were a few I was unfamiliar with, it was a little confusing at first to have so many characters. Stay with the story, it's worth it. I was never really sure whodunnit and liked the resolution (which of course made sense).

The Murder of Mr. Wickham is a delightful new murder mystery that will appeal to both Janeites and Agatha Christie fans.

Claudia Gray brings an inventive approach to this cozy and romantic Austen sequel/continuation. Plus, loads of imagination.

Gray takes up Austen’s pen and asks a couple of what-if questions. What would happen if many of Austen’s beloved characters knew each other and had a house party? And what if one of the guests murders the villainous Mr. Wickham?

Well, I found the book to be a resounding success. It’s such fun to read, and I enjoyed Gray’s interpretation of Austen’s characters – even if it didn’t quite match my own. But that’s to be expected!

Anyway, it’s an enjoyable read I wholeheartedly recommend.

Adaptation Recommendation: A limited series would work best for this to give it a binge effect and time to explore the characters. And it would be such a fun watch!

Content Note: PG-like for a murder. Trigger warning – a mild description of assault.

Overall Rating: 4.5 stars (rounded up for GoodReads.)
Romance Rating: 4 hearts

Disclosure: I received a free copy from the publisher and Austenprose via Netgalley. All opinions in the book review are my own.

(Note: We shared an excerpt of the book at silverpetticoatreview.com for more information on the book.)

This one is for Jane Austen fans- especially those who know ALL the characters from ALL the novels. A house party thrown by the Knightlys starts things off, introducing the various couples years on from where we left them in Austen's novels. Then Mr. Wickham, one of the most despised characters in literature, is murdered and we're off. Gray wisely uses the next generation to solve the crime. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I haven't read Austen for years and I know I didn't appreciate this as much as mega fans will. That said, it's a fun read with an interesting conceit.

*Received a copy for review.*
This was such a fun idea. There are few characters who deserve a comeuppance more than Wickam. However, these characters didn’t feel like the ones I have known.

Oof, I SO wanted to love this one but I didn’t. I’m a huge Jane Austen fan, and the first few chapters made me giddy to see all the beloved characters that were I clouded. Darcy and Elizabeth and their SON? Yes please! The villain Mr. Wickham crashing a dinner party? Yes!

Then it just…was so slow to go anywhere. The beginning feels like there is no real main character. The third person narrator switches from character to character and the dinner party is just boring! I spent so long waiting for the murder to even happen, much less see who did it.

I had high expectations but was super disappointed. I would pass on this one, though if you’re a big Austen fan you might find it cool to see the characters like I did.. If you’re not an Austen fan, definitely pass.

Put Jane Austen's characters together with a cozy mystery writer and you have Claudia Gray and an excellent book!
The Knightleys have planned a month-long house party and you might recognize some of the guests. The Darcys, the Brandons, the Prices, the Wentworths, along with 2 young adults, Juliet Tilney and Jonathan Darcy.
Even if you have never read Austen's books, this is such a well-developed cozy with so many suspects. Before the first dinner is done, a very unwelcome and uninvited guest, George Wickham arrives. He has made an enemy of nearly everyone at the table, and he has not come to make amends.
He manages to upset everyone in the house even more than they already are, and that is saying a lot. A fierce storm means that decency demands that they let him stay, and this house isn't big enough to avoid him for long. With so many well-bred and refined guests, it is quite shocking that most of them wish he was dead. But when Juliet finds his body, the question, of which of you did it, is left to her and Jonathan to discover the truth. Was it a servant, an unknown trespasser, or was one of the guests willing to risk their freedom for his demise?
The writing is prim and proper as you would expect and Jonathan is especially confounded when the rules of the society he knows are cast asunder. I thought it lost a little steam towards the middle, and while the identity of the murderer did not surprise me, how it ended did.

At a houseparty hosting Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, Emma and Mr. Knightly, Marianne and Col. Brandon, Anne and Cpt. Wentworth, Fanny and Mr. Bertram, and their various children, who should appear but the dastardly Mr. Wickham?

The Murder of Mr. Wickham plumbs five of Jane Austen's novels (the characters from Northanger Abby send their teen daughter but did not come themselves), then accuses them of murder!

It was great catching up with these characters again, and clever how unrelated people from different books end up all knowing each other. However, these couples who we left happy are now having marital difficulties, money trouble, and anger issues. It's quite melancholic to read that Elizabeth, Emma, and Marianne are all quietly miserable.

The Murder of Mr. Wickham is a fun closed-circle mystery with characters we know and love, however, the fact that we know them already means that we don't want anyone to be the murderer.

Thanks to Vintage and NetGalley for providing this e-book for review.

The Murder of Mr. Wickham starts off with an interesting premise. All of Jane Austen's main characters meet up for a stay at Mr. Knightly's estate, only for Mr. Wickham to turn up murdered. The story got off to a slow start as we catch up with all of the characters after the events of their novels. All of them have some connection to the devious Mr. Wickham and have a motive for murdering him. The author uses a lot of Austen's language, which I found clunky at times. I also struggled to keep all the characters straight and their relationship with Mr. Wickham. The mystery itself was unsatisfactory and the story seemed like a plot device to bring all of Austen's characters together. I liked the two main characters who were investigating the murder, Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney. The author did a great job with their character development and making the reader root for them! If you're a fan of Austen, this will be an interesting take, but lacks a good murder mystery for the mystery fans out there.

This was fun, appropriately paced, and kept me intrigued. I will be honest, in that I haven't read the Jane Austen books, but now I want to! I also felt it was easy to understand without reading those books first. Fun book!

This was an excellent mystery! This book had wonderful interpretations of many of Jane Austen's characters, plus introductions to delightful new ones! Whether you love Jane Austen's novels, or love a good mystery, or both, I would definitely recommend checking this book out!

I received a copy of this book from the blog tour company and publisher.

Definitely got into the book. Wondering who did it. Mystery in a locked room you wondered who actually offed Mr. WIchham a good mystery.

This book was quick and cute!
Would have enjoyed more if I was more knowledgeable on Jane Austin's characters, but enough was explained on page and wikipedia was helpful

The Murder of Mr. Wickham was an unique murder mystery based on all the characters from Jane Austen books. It's definitely for fans of Jane Austen and yes, Mr. Darcy is there in the book. It was set in the 1820's in the Regency period. The characters from the book were from 5 Jane Austen books- Pride & Prejudice, Emma, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park and Sense & Sensibility.

I'm only familiar with Pride and Prejudice and Emma, so I probably missed out on a few references here and there. But the book was still thoroughly entertaining and interesting. It was written like a classic and the language used was very formal. It took a long while to read this and I'm a very fast reader. The reason for that is because of the writing style, but that's only normal for this genre. The book was written very well and the characters were imbibed into the book spectacularly.

All the characters in the book met in Donwell Abbey for a house party hosted by Mr. Knightley and Emma. An unexpected guest arrives in the form of Mr. Wickham, yes the same evil man from Pride and Prejudice. Everyone seems to have been swindled or hurt by him in one way or the other. Suddenly, he turns up dead and is found Ms. Juliet Tinley and Mr. Jonathan Darcy. He is the eldest son of Mr. Darcy, heir to the Pemberly Estate. They both band together to solve this mystery.

The whodunit aspect of the book was fun. It was slow paced but entertaining. It is definitely aimed at fans fo Agatha Christie and Jane Austen. I would recommend it murder mystery lovers.

Emma & Mr Knightley are throwing a party at their country estate and couples from all of the other Jane Austen novels are invited, along with a few others. Unfortunately, there is one gatecrasher......Mr Wickham, and he is most unwelcome. It soon becomes clear that Wickham has come to collect on debts from bad investments from several of the partygoers, and those that he did not know previously, he is discovered snooping in their rooms, trying to find something with which to blackmail them. It should come as no surprise to anyone, therefore, when Mr Wickham is murdered. Because nearly every houseguest has a motive, and this is more fun than either of them has had in ages, Juliet Tilney, the smart and resourceful daughter of Catherine and Henry, and Jonathan Darcy, the Darcys’ eldest son, team up to try to solve the crime.
This is the perfect mash-up of Jane Austen novels and good old fashioned Agatha Christie-style mystery novels. Everything about this book was a delight. The characters were charming, and it was fun to see which novels they belonged to. It had an excellent mystery. oh, and it is set up for there to be a sequel. I can't wait! I loved the witty banter, and the dialogue is much easier to read ( does not put me to sleep) like the original Austen stories. I think I have read most of the re-telling of the Austen novels, but every time I have tried to read or listen to the original I fall asleep because of the dialogue. The dialogue in this made me think more Downton Abbey, so it was a much lighter read. I can not say enough good things about this book. I highly recommend this one!

I love mysteries and I love Jane Austen, so The Murder of Mr. Wickham is exactly my kind of book! I love how Gray connected all these beloved characters to create a really interesting and well detailed mystery! I thought she did a great job of keeping the spirit of the characters that we know and love, while making changes that made sense with the story that she's telling.

The new characters that we meet, Jonathan Darcy (Elizabeth and Darcy's eldest son) and Juliet Tilney (the daughter of Catherine and Henry Tilney) where very well written, and interesting. I really liked them and I loved how they worked as a team to solve the mystery of who murdered Wickham.

There were a few things that I did not love, mostly as they were very "of the times" when it came to character's views on women's rights (mostly what is and isn't appropriate for women to do) and homosexuality. Did these characters views make sense within the time period? Yes, it was a different time and views have definitely changed, so while I understand why these characters felt this way, I didn't necessarily love it. However, neither of those things had any barring on my enjoyment of the story!

Overall, this was a really good mystery and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

There's something inherently slimy about Mr. Wickham from Pride and Prejudice that makes him very conducive to murder mysteries: in P.D. James's Death Comes to Pemberley he's the accused murderer, whereas in Claudia's Gray's The Murder of Mr. Wickham he's the victim!

Emma and Mr. Knightley from Emma invite characters from all of Jane Austen's other novels to their home (although in the case of Juliet Tilney, she is an OC, the daughter of Henry Tilney and Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey). Mr. Wickham arrives, bad weather forces him to stay at Donwell Abbey, and then a few days later he's dead. Everyone has different reasons to detest Wickham, so it's up to Juliet and the Darcys's eldest son to uncover who killed him and how.

I found the story a solid read, and enjoyed catching up with the characters from Austen's novels. (Although I very much missed seeing Henry and Catherine.)

It wasn't as fun as I expected, as all of the couples are dealing with relationship issues, but that added a fair bit of drama to the story--and their relationships were fortunately healthier by the end. I also worried that the conclusion of the murder mystery would bear dire consequences for one of the characters, and that all the red herrings would lead to a complicated conclusion. While I did not guess the culprit, I thought the explanation made sense.

However, I thought the pacing of the middle could have been tighter, as we had some chapters where Juliet and Jonathan Darcy didn't uncover much. Gray does not aim for an exact copy of Austen's prose, but there were some iffy anachronistic bits. (This is not Stephanie Barron-levels of historical accuracy.)

Finally, on a nitpicky note, I understand why Gray chose to place the novels at very specific times, but Sense and Sensibility makes no sense in 1819! It should be the early 1790s!!!


In short: an enjoyable murder mystery, but less of a romp than I expected

A murder mystery where the main characters - and suspects - are the characters from Jane Austen novels! Claudia Gray has taken roughly when the characters were alive (based on when written) from the books and combined them into an interesting Regency murder mystery. These characters are invited to a house party hosted by the Knightleys. In attendance are characters like Elizabeth Bennett Darcy and her husband, now middle-aged with children of their own (including their son Jonathan who is attending the party as well), Edmund Bertram and Fanny Price Bertram, and young Juliet Tilney (daughter of the characters from Northanger Abbey). The victim? George Wickham of course. He has wronged many in this group and ends up murdered. Jonathan Darcy and Juliet Tilney team up to try to solve the murder to prevent a servant or traveler from being wrongly accused.

This was an interesting book! I liked seeing all of these characters together. The hardest part is probably the writing - just because its written more in the style of the 1800s authors.

I received my copy from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Review of The Murder of Mr. Wickham

This is definitely a read for fans of Jane Austin. For the rest, it probably helps if you have at least a working knowledge of her most famous works. In the cast of characters at Donwell Abbey for a house party are Mr. and Mrs. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Tilley and Juliet from Northanger Abbey, Captain and Mrs. Wentworth from Persuasion, Colonel and Mrs. Brandon from Sense and Sensibility, the Bertrams from Mansfield Park, and of course the Knightleys from Emma. It takes an extremely clever author to make this all work. Claudia Gray not only gathers the characters, she also displays an ear for the cadences of the early nineteenth century.
Having said that, however, it seems it would take a greater Austen aficionado than I to truly enjoy all this hard work. I found that only three or four chapters in, I was almost longing for the nasty Mr. Wickham to be murdered more quickly and spare us the pain of his smarmy innuendo.
Gray has written more a novel of manners, a la Austen, than a murder mystery. To those who can appreciate the intersection of the two, this novel will bring great joy. For me, however, it will be a farewell.
(Note: for those who are not intimately acquainted with the Austen novels, it will likely be helpful to take notes in order to keep straight who is interacting with whom.)

Would I recommend this book to a fellow Janeite? Yes, I would. Because it is clearly written by someone who love those characters a lot.

But as a houseparty/murder mystery? Eh.

First of all, I have to say, I picked this book up because I love both Jane Austen and Claudia Gray. The idea of bringing most of her beloved characters together at a house party hosted by Emma, where Mr. Wickham gets murdered? Love it! I mean. Who wouldn't.

And here's the thing: there is SO much love here for Jane's work and her characters, that it's sometimes too much. So much research went into this book, that additional information (often about the period, or what a character thinks about a specific aspect of the period) is often given in brackets, which, for a Jane Austen lover is absolutely fine, but I feel could irritate some readers? Even I found some of them a bit superfluous.

But as far as the characters go, there is so much love that it really feels like a natural continuation of Austen's stories (the Wentworths for example lose their fortune, find themselves in a similar situation as the Eliots do in Persuasion, and Anne finally tells Wentworth just what she thinks of his misguided pride. Go Anne!). It was really wonderful to see them all again. Well. All of them except the Tilneys, which I am still somewhat miffed about, because love Henry Tilney to pieces. At least we get his and Catherine's daughter (Catherine has gone on to become a successful novelist, while Henry still seems to be his adorable self), which. Fine. I'll take it as the next best thing. I could spend a lot of time writing about how much I loved what Gray did with the characters (she even manages to make Miss Bates appear in a good light!), but that would take forever and ruin the book for everyone. So. If you already love Jane's characters and ever wondered what happened after the weddings, this is the book for you.

But... As a murder mystery it didn't really work for me. Mini Tilney and Darcy Jr decide to investigate together after Wickham is found dead but really. I mean. Who cares? There wasn't enough time spent on decent red herrings or an atmosphere of "omg they all could have cheerfully murdered him" that the final resolution left me a bit. Unimpressed.

But still. As a book about how Anne and Frederick, Emma and Knightley, Elizabeth and Darcy, Marianne and Brandon, and Fanny and Edmund (ugh. Why was he there, true to his annoying, parsimonious, holier-than-thou self, but not Tilney? Honestly...) are doing after the conclusion of their respective books, it was WONDERFUL. I even found myself agreeing with Fanny (granted, only once, when she stands up to Edmund, the rest of the time she is her rather pathetic self), and that is not an easy thing to achieve. Just saying... But I still feel like all the research and obvious love could have been edited a bit to make more room for the murder mystery part of it.