Jane and the Ghosts of Netley

New York: Bantam Books, 2003. First Edition, First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/very good. 294 pages. Inscribed as Stephanie Barron on title page. Stephanie Barron was born Francine Stephanie Barron in Binghamton, NY in 1963. In her seventh captivating adventure, Jane Austen finds her crime-solving mettle put to the test in a confounding case of intrigue, murder, and high treason. Among the haunted ruins of an ancient abbey, Jane is drawn into a shadow world of dangerous secrets and traitorous hearts where not only her life is at stake - but the fate of England. As Jane Austen stands before the abandoned ruins of Netley Abbey, she imagines that ghosts really do haunt the centuries-old monastery. But the green-cloaked figure who startles her is all too human and he bears an unexpected missive from Lord Harold Trowbridge, one of the British government's most trusted advisers - and a man who holds a high place in Jane's life. Trowbridge tells Jane about a suspected traitor in their midst - and the disastrous consequences if she succeeds. But is Sophia Challoner, a beautiful widow with rumored ties to Emperor Bonaparte, really an agent of the enemy? Dispatched to Netley Lodge, Jane seets about gaining the confidence of the mysterious and intriguing lady even as Trowbridge's grim prediction bears fruit: a British frigate is set afire and its shipwright found with his throat cut. Elegantly intriguing, Jane and the Ghosts of Netley is a beautifully crafted novel of wit, character, and suspense that transports Jane and her many fans into a mystery of truly historical proportions - and a case that will test the amateur sleuth's true colors under fire. Chosen by TIME Magazine as one of the best summer mystery novels! Francine Mathews was born in Binghamton, NY in 1963. In 1981, she started college at Princeton-one of the most formative experiences of her life. There she learned to write news stories for The Daily Princetonian-a hobby that led to two part-time jobs as a journalist for The Miami Herald and The San Jose Mercury News. Francine won an Arthur W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship in the Humanities in her senior year. But the course she remembers most vividly from her time at Princeton is "The Literature of Fact," taught by John McPhee, the Pulitzer Prize winning author and staff writer for The New Yorker. John influenced Francine's writing more than even she knows and certainly more than she is able to say. She applied to the CIA, spent a year temping in Northern Virginia while the FBI asked inconvenient questions of everyone she had ever known, passed a polygraph test on her twenty-sixth birthday, and was immediately thrown into the Career Trainee program: Boot Camp for the Agency's Best and Brightest. Four years as an intelligence analyst at the CIA were profoundly fulfilling, the highlights being Francine's work on the Counterterrorism Center's investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, and sleeping on a horsehair mattress in a Spectre-era casino in the middle of Bratislava. Another peak moment was her chance to debrief ex-President George Bush in Houston in 1993. But what she remembers most about the place are the extraordinary intelligence and dedication of most of the staff-many of them women-many of whom cannot be named. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. More than twenty books have followed.