First Impressions and the Tale of the Bookish Mystery

Bibliophiles rejoice! The man who brought you last year’s Shakespearean whodunnit, The Bookman’s Tale, has returned, and this time he’s on the trail of another famed author—Jane Austen. Charlie Lovett’s First Impressions delves into the authorship of Pride and Prejudice—more specifically, the question of whether Austen wrote those famous words, or stole the idea from an elderly cleric named the Rev. Richard Mansfield. Don’t worry, Austenites, it’s not as sacrilegious as it sounds. In fact, it’s a story to do you proud, and in Sophie we have a true Austen heroine, in that she keeps getting bothered by disagreeable people when she’d rather be reading a book.
You know the story: girl meets haughty yet handsome American. Girl’s book-loving uncle tragically meets his maker. Girl meets haughty yet handsome British man. Girl gets wrapped up in a mystery that could get her killed, or worse expelled, as well as expose possibly dark secrets about Jane Austen. But Sophie’s not merely an Austen heroine; she’s also a little bit Nancy Drew, whose sleuthing and research are sure to blow this case sky high.
Once you’ve whet your appetite with First Impressions, here are a few more bookish mysteries to keep you sated:
The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Gothic noir set in and around a Barcelona bookstore and a maze of manuscripts, the aforementioned cemetery. You sold yet? There’s enough mystery in Zafon’s three books to fill a library, what with the enigmatic authors, murky wartime morality, and labyrinthine backstories. Not to mention, Fermin Romero de Torres is one of the great secondary characters of our time.
The Club Dumas, by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Quick: name your ideal career path! Now everyone who said “book detective” raise your hand. Well, that’s exactly what Lucas Corso does for a living, hunting down rare manuscripts. The plot runs on parallel tracks as Corso tracks the authenticity of two literary works, one of which is a fragment of The Three Musketeers. In doing so he ends up swirling in a stew of Satanism, the Inquisition, and salty women. All aboard.
The Dante Club, by Matthew Pearl
The Dante Club—comprised of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, along with publisher J.T. Fields—are on the verge of unveiling America’s first translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy. Of course, there’s also a group of nefarious, cerebral thugs that wants to keep the wisdom of those written words silent. Things, as is their way, get complicated after a series of murders that clearly resemble Dante’s descriptions of Hell’s punishments.
The Sherlockian, by Graham Moore
When Arthur Conan Doyle resurrected Sherlock Holmes, he didn’t send out a series of informative tweets or pen a blog post explaining his decision. But what if he did write it down in his diary? The hunt for the missing journal from the consulting detective’s interregnum is at the center of Moore’s thriller—that and the murder of a preeminent Doyle scholar. Basically, the game is afoot.
What’s your favorite bookish mystery?