Soho Press Presents JANE AND THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS by Stephanie Barron

Readers will love celebrating the holidays with the twelfth installment of Stephanie Barron's fan-favorite Jane Austen Mystery series, now with a new packaging and a new publisher.

Soho Press is pleased to become the publisher of Stephanie Barron's "Being a Jane Austen Mystery" series and to introduce Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas in an updated, beautiful packaging. Releasing just in time for Christmas, Jane is sure to be an enticing gift book, as well as a hotly anticipated installment of this popular series.

Christmas Eve, 1814: Jane Austen has been invited to spend the holiday with family and friends at The Vyne, the gorgeous ancestral home of the wealthy and politically prominent Chute family. As the year fades and friends begin to gather beneath the mistletoe for the twelve days of Christmas festivities, Jane and her circle are in a celebratory mood: Mansfield Park is selling nicely; Napoleon has been banished to Elba; British forces have seized Washington, DC; and on Christmas Eve, John Quincy Adams signs the Treaty of Ghent, which will end a war nobody in England really wanted.

Jane, however, discovers holiday cheer is fleeting. One of the Yuletide dies in a tragic accident whose circumstances Jane immediately views with suspicion. If the accident was in fact murder, the killer is one of Jane's fellow snow-bound guests. With clues scattered amidst cleverly-crafted charades, dark secrets coming to light during parlor games, and old friendships returning to haunt the Christmas parties, whom can Jane trust to help her discover the truth and stop the killer from striking again?

With its wealth of fascinating historical details about Georgian Christmas traditions, very different from our modern, Victorian-inspired traditions, Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas will also include a web guide for readers to decorate, drink, eat, and play their way to new traditions!

Barron will launch Jane and the Twelve Days of Christmas at the 2014 annual convention of the Jane Austen Society in Montreal.

Stephanie Barron was born in Binghamton, New York, the last of six girls. She attended Princeton and Stanford Universities, where she studied history, before going on to work as an intelligence analyst at the CIA. She wrote her first book in 1992 and left the Agency a year later. Since then, she has written fifteen books. She lives and works in Denver, Colorado.