In what I affectionately refer to as my “mom book group” – started during the pandemic under heat lamps on a friend’s lawn – getting everyone to agree on a novel can be a challenge. If your book group, like mine, has competing tastes, “The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton,” by Jennifer N. Brown, may be just the ticket. It is a plot-driven page-turner that weaves together historical fiction, academic satire, and detective fiction into a compulsively readable and intellectually rewarding book. Like A.S. Byatt’s 1990 award-winning Possession , which intertwines the lives of Victorian poets with academics whose bread and butter is studying them, “The Lost Book of Elizabeth Barton” toggles between historical figures and the modern-day scholars hot on their trail. Here, the subject of scholarly scrutiny is the eponymous Elizabeth, a Roman Catholic mystic who spoke out against King Henry VIII and his plan to break from the pope and found a new church.…