It’s in defense of Wickham, against the supposed wrongs done to him by his childhood playmate Mr. Wickham, who initially attracts the attention of the Bennet sisters (not only flighty Kitty and Lydia but also the should-know-better Elizabeth) with his quick tongue and good looks. One of those characters is Pride and Prejudice’s lying cad Mr. Grief ruins a cozy mystery faster than a tornado at a tea party, and fortunately for all concerned, Jane Austen presented her readers with plenty of characters detestable enough to launch a thousand cozies. And the second seems natural: since one of the hallmarks of a cozy mystery is that the murder at the heart of the story, far from being a tragedy, amount to little more than an absorbing topic of conversation, it’s virtually a necessity that the murder victim be somebody all concerned thoroughly disliked. The first is easy enough to accomplish and has been done more or less effectively by hundreds of pastiche-writers in the last two centuries. Wickham, the new novel from Claudia Gray, trades on two of the oldest and most persistent yearnings of all Jane Austen fans: the desire for all of Austen’s characters to know each other and inhabit the same world, and the desire for that summit of all reading pleasures: a Jane Austen cozy mystery.
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