The Historical Imagination: In His Occasional Round Up of Recent Historical Fiction Jerome De Groot Considers a Wide Range of Books Demonstrating the Range and Vitality of the Genre. Fiction about the Past, It Seems, Has an Amazing Capacity to Explore and Investigate the Diversity of History

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Lynn Shepherd's Murder at Mansfield Park (Beautiful Books, 7.99 [pounds sterling]) demonstrates the astonishing fecundity of Jane Austen's work and the ways in which it is continually being transformed, continued and evolved. After the zombies, the next mash-up direction seems to be Agatha Christie, as Shepherd grafts a country-house murder mystery onto the original novel. There is some method to this seeming madness--recent critics have pointed out that Fanny Price is a hard heroine to like and here she becomes villainess and victim--Shepherd has a lot of fun with the setting, the characters and the dialogue. It is a romp, nicely iconoclastic while staying true to Austen's sharpness and acuity.

Julia Stuart's curious Balthazar Jones and the Tower of London Zoo (HarperCollins, …