A Crime Through Time: Miss Darcy Investigates

Blackwell combines a love story, time travel, and a touch of mystery in her charming if lightweight Jane Austen–inspired debut. In 1799, 21-year-old Georgiana Darcy—younger sister of Pride and Prejudice’s Fitzwilliam Darcy—is having an unhappy day at Pemberley. To escape an unwanted suitor who’s wandering the property with plans to propose, Georgiana sets off for the nearby woods, where she picks up a small rectangular object, only to be whisked to 1995. She arrives in the same spot, beneath a now-massive tree on the former grounds of Pemberly, and notices the body of a man hanging from its boughs. Startled, she stumbles out of the woods and meets Quinn, a handsome member of the security team for a Regency-era period drama being filmed on the premises who mistakes her for a cast member. What follows is a fish-out-of-water tale that wrings plenty of amusement out of Georgiana’s struggles to adjust to 20th-century slang, fashion, and social mores, but mystery readers will find the whodunit plot, which often takes a backseat to the tender romance between the leads, flimsy. Still, there’s enough here to satisfy Austenites. (Mar.)