Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Investigator: A Novel

by Kelly Gardiner, Sharmini Kumar

Overview

In this imaginative cozy mystery, the search for a missing maid leads Miss Caroline Bingley from Jane Austen’s beloved Pride & Prejudice into murder and mayhem in the gritty underbelly of Regency London.

Two years after her brother Charles Bingley weds Miss Jane Bennett, Miss Caroline Bingley is visiting her brother's country estate near Pemberley, the home of their best friends, Mr. and Mrs. Darcy. Restless and out of sorts, Caroline wonders if there's more to life than playing cribbage and paying calls on country neighbors.

When Georgiana Darcy's maid, Jayani disappears and Georgiana sets off to find her, Caroline races to to find them in London, where she stumbles on a shocking, cold-blooded murder. Reunited with Georgiana, the pair careen through the gritty, grimy underbelly of London, a world unfamiliar to two genteel aristocratic ladies. Assisted by Caroline's trusty manservant, Gordon, the tenacious Caroline demands answers of shady characters, police magistrates, and mysterious East India Company men to discover the killer. Their search will reveal the cost of Empire on India and its people . . . and Miss Bingley's incomparable powers of investigation.

As Caroline puts her superior new talents to work, she finds out exactly what an accomplished, independent woman with a sharp mind and a large fortune can achieve—even when pitted against secrets, scandal, and a murderer with no mercy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780063422599
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/08/2025
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Kelly Gardiner writes historical fiction for all ages. Her books include The Firewatcher Chronicles; Goddess, based on the life of Mademoiselle de Maupin; 1917: Australia’s Great War, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Young People’s History Prize and Asher Award; the Swashbuckler pirate trilogy; and a picture book, Billabong Bill’s Bushfire Christmas. Her young adult novels include Act of Faith, which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the ASA’s Barbara Jefferis Award,and Gold Inky; and The Sultan’s Eyes which was also shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. A former journalist and editor, Kelly now teaches creative writing at La Trobe University.

Sharmini Kumar is the founder and Artistic Director of 24 Carrot Productions and a producer of AustenCon, an annual Jane Austen celebration, now in its fifth year. She has adapted Persuasion and Pride and Prejudice for the stage, Emma for online performance during Covid, and she mostly recently co-wrote and directed the original musical adaptation of Sense and Sensibility. She is currently working on a stage adaption of Mansfield Park. Sharmini has written, directed, and produced many performance pieces and short films including Shakespeare in Therapy and The Regina Monologues, as well as radio documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. When she's not writing and directing, she works as a doctor and teaches medicine.

Editorial Reviews

"Delightful … Refreshingly, Gardiner and Kumar don’t sand down Caroline’s less agreeable qualities, and instead use her flagrant classism and stubbornness to infuse the narrative with a welcome degree of friction. That character depth, plus a well-oiled whodunit plot, help this stand out in a crowded field." — Publishers Weekly

"A critique of colonialism that still reads with the coziness of a cup of tea. Caroline Bingley proves herself worthy of her own mystery series." — Library Journal

From the Publisher

2025-05-03
After 212 years, the sister of Elizabeth Bennet’s brother-in-law gets her chance to shine in a most unexpected role.

Not that the title is entirely accurate. Caroline Bingley, the wealthy and forceful sister of Charles Bingley, who married Lizzie’s sister Jane, is roused to action when Georgiana Darcy, the younger sister of Lizzie’s husband, leaves Derbyshire for London with hardly a word of explanation. Following her trail with the help of Gordon, her remarkably versatile butler, Caroline soon finds Georgiana and learns that she took off abruptly in pursuit of Jade, her missing maid. Jade, an Indian woman whose birth name is Jayani, isn’t much harder to locate than Georgiana, but the circumstances of this discovery are dire. Caroline finds her in a questionable rooming house bending over her brother, Sameer, who’s been stabbed to death. Police Magistrate Pickersgill naturally assumes that the servant killed her brother, but Georgiana can’t believe that Jade would do such a thing, so Caroline, focusing on the aristocratic Dunston family, who’d employed Sameer as a footman, resolves to unmask the real murderer, her own suspicions quickened by the Dunstons’ unwillingness to say anything about their connection to him. Gardiner and Kumar’s Regency prose deals resourcefully with matters far more sinister and violent than anything in Jane Austen. But fans ofPride and Prejudice had better revel in the authors’ portraits of Georgiana, Charles (who vanishes after the opening chapter), and Caroline, since no other characters from Austen return in this period whodunit.

The heroine is better described as a meddling busybody than a private investigator. But wait for the broadly implied sequel.

Kirkus Reviews