The Death of Jane Lawrence is a gothic horror story that features magicians and a magic system, unbeknownst to our main character, Jane. 

Jane Shorington's parents passed when she was young and since was raised with another family that looked after her. She has managed to earn her keep by self-teaching herself accounting. When they decide to move out of town, Jane realizes that the best way to keep her independence is to marry. She chooses Doctor Augustine Lawrence and proposes a mutually beneficial relationship and offered to do his bookkeeping at his practice. He says yes, as long as she never breaks the agreement and visits his family estate, Lindridge Hall. Due to a mudslide, she ends up spending the night at his manor the day they are married. She finds her husband is not the self-assured person she thought, but a trembling paranoid man that night and sees ghosts in the house. 

I very much enjoyed the first 50% of the book and it definitely had a spooky atmosphere with sinister and tense undertones. Jane has been thrown into this danger without understanding what she had accepted when marrying Augustine. The book eventually moves from hauntings to explaining that there was magic and magicians/sorcerers and that drives the book for the last 50%. 

I was excited to possibly see a sweet romance, based on the beginning courtship of Jane and Augustine, but this book definitely does not follow on that aspect. There is romance, but it's a bit different than I expected. I wouldn't even say this is a horror book, but it delivers on the gothic setting. 

Things the book does well is the gothic setting and the characterization. Jane is established as a very rational and analytical person, meaning she can easily pick up on math and accounting and provides a reasonable voice to Augustine. Augustine is a very accomplished surgeon, but truly struggles with his guilt at losing patience, so much that it causes him to manifest ghosts. These characteristics drive there interactions well and I found that I could believe in them and their decisions. This is definitely gothic semi-horror, with a lot of gore (which is to be expected when one of the main characters is a surgeon). The atmosphere is easily achieved as haunting and the prose is well with vivid descriptions. 

The plot is where I fell off completely. Personally I love supernatural horror, and this started out as that... but definitely didn't end as that. It turns to magic and sorcery which is explained using mathematics, which is definitely not my strong suit. There are so many parts to follow and the plot becomes so convoluted towards the end. It wasn't so much horror at the end to me and the ending was so confusing? I truly just didn't like the twist that happened. That's not necessarily a bad thing, a lot of books have big plot twists that change the entire perspective of what we read, but it's just not something I personally would enjoy. 

Because of that, it's hard for me to distinguish what kind of book this is, because it keeps the gothic romance throughout, but the horror aspect of it seems to go away after the 50% mark.