The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis

The Vanished Bride by Bella Ellis ISBN-13: 9780593099056 Hardcover: 304 pages Publisher: Berkley Books Released: Sept. 10, 2019

Source: ebook review copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

Book Description, Modified from Goodreads:
Yorkshire, 1845. A young wife and mother has gone missing from her home, with only a large pool of blood in her room to hint at what has happened. Just a few miles away, a humble parson's daughters--the Brontë sisters--learn of the crime. Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë are horrified and intrigued by the mysterious disappearance.

These three creative, energetic, and resourceful women quickly realize that they have all the skills required to make for excellent "lady detectors." Not yet published novelists, they have well-honed imaginations. As they investigate, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne are confronted with a society that believes a woman's place is in the home, not scouring the countryside looking for clues. But nothing will stop the sisters from discovering what happened to the vanished bride, even as they find their own lives are in great peril...


My Review:
The Vanished Bride is a mystery set in 1845 in England. Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, and Anne Brontë were each view point characters, and the story focused almost more on describing their lives and relationships than on the mystery. While I did learn a lot about them, I didn't particularly care for them as people. They tended to be rude just because they didn't feel like being polite. They also had childish fights about who would lead the questioning or if a clue was important or not. But, hey, lots of character development, and they were creative and resourceful (and often deceitful) in their efforts to solve the mystery.

There's a ghost (only seen by Emily) wanting peace. There's an abused wife that's vanished from the manor house and a series of clues that the constable never looked for. By about halfway through, I knew what had happened and who was involved (though I didn't have enough information yet to assign the right actions to the right people). The point of the story seemed to be that a woman should never marry (a man, anyway) but should forge their own, brilliant path in life. Their feminism was based on the concerns of their time period rather than modern feminism, and the author showed what life could be like for women at that time.

There were a few uses of bad language. There was no sex. Overall, I'd recommend this to fans of historical-writers-becoming-sleuths novels.


If you've read this book, what do you think about it? I'd be honored if you wrote your own opinion of the book in the comments.