"Sister" Jane

About the "Sister" Jane series

Jane Arnold — known to everyone as "Sister" Jane — is the septuagenarian Master of Foxhounds for a Virginia hunt club, and Rita Mae Brown's second long-running mystery series, set in the same rolling hunt-country Virginia as Mrs. Murphy but built around a human amateur sleuth rather than a talking-animal narration gimmick. Sister runs her hunt with an old-money Virginian's total confidence, navigates the genteel social warfare of a horse-and-hound community where everyone has known everyone for generations, and keeps stumbling across bodies on the hunt field or in the woods her club rides through. Brown, herself a Master of Foxhounds in real life, writes the sport itself in loving, expert detail — the hounds' individual personalities, the choreography of a hunt, the politics of who gets invited to ride with whom — making the foxhunting world as much a subject of the books as the murders are.

Like Mrs. Murphy, the series gives some narrative point of view to animals — hounds, horses, foxes, and the local wildlife all get sections reflecting on the human drama unfolding around them — but the tone leans more into old-Virginia social comedy and less into cozy-mystery cuteness than the Murphy books. Seventeen novels have appeared since 2000, with new entries still arriving regularly, making this one of Brown's most durable ongoing series alongside Mrs. Murphy. This is the series for readers who want Brown's small-town-Virginia voice and animal point-of-view device applied to a different sport and a sharper-edged human sleuth.

How to read this series

Publication order, starting with Outfoxed (2000), which introduces Sister, her hunt club, and the rotating cast of hound, horse, and fox narrators alongside her. The mysteries are largely self-contained case by case, but Sister's standing in the hunt community, her romantic life, and the recurring animal characters develop across the whole run, so reading in order preserves that continuity best. There's no need to have read Brown's Mrs. Murphy series first — the two share a general setting in Virginia hunt country and a similar animal-narration device, but no characters or plot threads cross over.