First Impressions: A Novel of Old Books, Unexpected Love, and Jane Austen by Charlie Lovett

I have been reading all the short, easy, quick and fun reads that are on my Goodreads to-read list lately, and this was one of them. Any book about Jane Austen is going to catch my attention (obviously) and I thought this one was an interesting one. Half of the book was a fictionalized story about Jane herself, set in the late 1700s, about the time she was first writing Pride and Prejudice. The other half of the book (in alternating chapters) was about a girl in today's times, who's trying to solve a mystery of how her bookish uncle died and what reason someone could have had to try and kill him, and then later, trying to solve a mystery about whether Jane Austen really wasn't the first author of Pride and Prejudice or if she'd plagiarized it. It was a fun story, but I have to say that the plot was very, very obvious to anyone except the main character. I knew from the first second that the bad guy was the bad guy, and the good guy was the good guy--it was incredibly obvious. And the ending was RIDICULOUSLY abrupt and disappointing--I was seriously four pages from the end and the girl was stuck in a burning house in the middle of the climactic scene. There was no denouement whatsoever, which kind of ruined it for me. But the rest of it was still enjoyable and not a terrible way to spend a couple of hours.