La mort s'invite à Pemberley

This is really more a response to Pride & Prejudice than a mystery. Far more words are devoted to unravelling the characters' hidden emotional turmoil and motives in that novel than to the death or ensuing investigation at Pemberley.
Read it expecting a prose dissertation on Austen and not a typical murder mystery novel, and you'll be less likely to be disappointed by it.

Hm, I think I'd give this 2.5 stars if I could. I'm dubious of Jane Austen sequels, but P.D. James is such a well-known author that I thought this was worth a try. Unfortunately it was still disappointing. It wasn't terrible; but it wasn't great either. The first chapter's lengthy and plodding recap of Pride and Prejudice felt painful; really will anybody be reading this book who isn't familiar with the original? The Austen characters seem flat and dull, the "mystery" is resolved very clumsily at the end, and the dialog mostly lacks the sparkle of Austen's actual writing. I haven't read a lot of P.D. James's mysteries but I know she's considered an excellent writer, so I'm disappointed this book wasn't better. Although it kept me reading, and it wasn't actually bad writing, at no time was I ever deceived into thinking I was reading actual Austen, and I think that's the true test of an Austen sequel. The one thing that I do remember particularly liking as original was that Georgiana ended up marrying a brand new character, not paired off with Col. Fitzwilliam which almost every other "sequel" I've read seems to do.

Death Comes to Pemberley is the first book I've read by P.D. James, and I understand that it's a complete departure from anything she's ever written. That is a mighty impressive thing for a ninety-two year old author to do. It's fabulously inspiring.

However impressed I may be with the courage it took to write a mystery based on the characters of Jane Austen's beloved Pride and Prejudice, I am also a bit disappointed. This mystery novel is not compelling or fun. Jane Austen wrote social commentary, which always included some witty and humorous banter in the midst of all the seriousness, and it is this clever, lighthearted spark that is missing from this mystery.

That's not to say that it's not a smart novel; P.D. James has devised a mystery which is very appropriate for the setting and time that is also loyal to Austen's characters. My criticism is that she did not go far enough in drawing them out. There wasn't enough dialogue between the characters, not even between Darcy and Elizabeth(until the epilogue). That would have been the true challenge in capturing Austen's prose, and it seems that P.D. James avoided it.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an author in possession of a fortune of talent must be in want of Jane Austen's audience, and I do intend to read more P.D. James in the future--but in her own idiom.

P.D. James imagines what happens to Elizabeth and Darcy several years after the end of "Pride and Prejudice", when a man dies by violence in the woods at Pemberley, and Wickham is accused as the murderer. Not really successful as an Austen homage, nor as a mystery.