![]() "The country house was very much the setting of the orthodox Christie crime novel," she says. It is also the archetypal setting for a murder mystery, and no one understands why better than James herself. The gifts it bestows on its inhabitants – both owners and servants – and the duties and loyalties it exacts from them exert a directional pull on the course of the book. ![]() The house that gives its name to the novel stands at its physical and emotional heart. The result is a murder trial in which the Darcys find themselves inextricably entangled and which threatens their present happiness and future security. ![]() Jane and Bingley live just 30 miles away, Mrs Bennet remains at a conveniently inconvenient distance, and all is highly felicitous – until the night when a carriage careens out of the wind-lashed darkness and disgorges Elizabeth's wayward sister, Lydia, screaming that her husband, the nefarious Wickham, is dead. ![]() Set six years after the conclusion of Pride and Prejudice, the novel finds Elizabeth and Darcy happily ensconced at Pemberley: tending to the estate and its tenants, delighting in their two young sons, deeply in love. True to the original in tone and tempo, but with a nice, messy murder offering a window on to both the inner lives of the familiar characters and the legal and medical systems of the time, the book stands as an estimable sequel to Austen's text. The result is Death Comes to Pemberley, published this week. ![]()
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