Biographies of Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855) chronicle her quiet life in Haworth, a remote Yorkshire village. They reveal that she wrote her masterpiece, "Jane Eyre," under the pen name Currer Bell; that her father, Patrick, was a parson; that her sisters, Emily and Anne, also published novels under pseudonyms (Ellis and Acton Bell respectively); that her brother, Branwell, was addicted to opium, and that Charlotte experienced an unrequited love affair with a married man and finally married her father's curate, only to die of pneumonia a year later at age 39.

It was one such biography that inspired Laura Joh Rowland to fictionalize the author's life in "The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë," a literary mystery. "She was the ultimate yearning, romantic, creative spirit," Rowland says in an essay on her website (www.laurajohrowland.com).

Rowland, the granddaughter of Chinese and Korean immigrants, clearly is a creative spirit herself. Her many earlier novels include the acclaimed "Snow Empress" and "Red Chrysanthemum." In an addendum to "The Secret Adventures of Charlotte Brontë," she points out that its fictive world is built around a scaffolding of actual people and historical events.

As the story begins, Charlotte receives a letter from her publisher accusing her of breach of contract (he refuses to believe that Ellis, Acton and Currer Bell are different people). She and sister Anne travel to London -- a major and stressful undertaking for them both -- to resolve the issue. Just as Charlotte used the eponymous Jane to narrate "Jane Eyre," Rowland employs Charlotte to tell her story, cleverly capturing Brontë's precise voice and Victorian manner of expression. On the eve of the journey to London, Charlotte sets the Gothic tone of peril and suspense that so palpably dominates her narrative:

"Now as the hour grows late and the candles burn low, I wonder if I would have gone to London had I known that I was taking my first steps toward a man who personified evil and madness. Would I have gone, knowing what pleasure and pain, hope and despair, terror and glory would be mine?"

Charlotte compares the story she is about to relate to a medieval tapestry: "Each tiny creature pursued his own business as if unaware of the folk in distant sections of the tapestry; yet all were joined by the underlying warp." That underlying warp is a treacherous conspiracy of international proportions led by none other than the stealthy, elusive Kuan, a Chinese gangster who threatens the English monarchy and, indeed, the very fabric of the English empire.

On one of her first days in London, as she is returning to her lodgings off the squalid Pater Noster Row, Charlotte witnesses an alley stabbing. The dead woman is Isabel White. Charlotte had met Isabel, a woman about her own age, on the train to London. "She was tall and slender," writes Charlotte in her best bodice-ripper prose, "with pale gold hair and a face so pure of line and complexion that it seemed modeled from rosy alabaster by a great artist. Dark lashes shaded eyes of deep, clear aquamarine. Her mouth was full yet sensitive, the lips a natural pink."

As a crowd of spectators gathers, Charlotte decides to hunt down the murderer no matter what the cost. John Slade, a spy for Her Majesty's Foreign Office, is present in the mob of onlookers as police remove White's body, and it is he who provides the novel's love interest.

Meanwhile, as Charlotte was wending her way toward London, a 29-year-old gunsmith in Birmingham, England, entered his study, removed a pistol from its display case and shot himself in the temple. Charlotte intermittently interrupts the account of her own experiences and directs the reader's attention "towards other segments in the tapestry of my story," such as the incident in Birmingham.

Rowland's impressive, detailed descriptions of the sites and phenomena of Victorian England, particularly of London, give the narrative depth and compensate, perhaps, for some unlikely plot twists. Never mind plausibility, Rowland simply refuses to let readers lift their eyes from the page.

Katherine Bailey also reviews for Publishers Weekly and the Philadelphia Inquirer. She lives in Bloomington.