1824. The Darcy family are aboard their yacht, The Pemberley, when Arab corsairs seize it and murder the crew. The Darcys and Jane, their daughter, find refuge first in an Ottoman fort and then at the British consulate in Athens.


The Greeks are rebelling against their hated Turkish overlords. Buccaneers and fortune-hunters flock to Greece, eager for booty. War rages, and the all-appalling, pitiless Odysseus governs Athens. Anarchy, mayhem and Turkish armies threaten Athens. In the chaos, the eye of Odysseus lights on Jane Darcy, who is only twelve.


Meanwhile, Edmund Bertram, the abusive chaplain at the consulate, shamefully mistreats his wife, Fanny. In despair, she begins a tentative romance with a frequent guest of the Consul, the piratical fortune hunter Edward Trelawny. 


Will the six women escape the desperate carnage around them? Will Fanny free herself from the duplicitous tyrant who rules her life? Will young Jane evade the clutches of the merciless impaler who pursues her?


Jane and the Jackal is a fast-moving historical romance revealing the inner strengths and weaknesses of Jane Austen’s heroines in a lawless and brutal world far from the familiar peace of rural England.