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The Intrigue At Highbury:
THE INTRIGUE AT HIGHBURY (Or, Emma’s Match), by Carrie Bebris. TOR (www.tor-forge.com), 2010, 317 pp., $22.99. ISBN 978-0-7653-1848-0
Quite the opposite of Oscar the cat (see previous book review), who gently supports people at the end of life, Ms. Bebis has the uncanny gift of bringing back the dead -- or so it seems! One could argue that Jane Austen is indeed still in the house, for Ms. Bebris’ writing so closely mimics Ms. Austen’s delightful style.
I’ve reviewed Ms. Bebris’ Mr. and Mrs. Darcy Mysteries before. Solid, with lots of twisty turns and tongue-in-cheek humor. Elizabeth and Darcy fall victim to a stagecoach robbery and the plot thickens with the addition of gypsies and mysterious deaths. The Darcy’s reside with Mr. and Mrs. Knightley from “Emma” and the four team up to solve the robbery and a series of crimes.
This novel did cause me some difficulty, though, with the intertwining of the Darcy’s from PRIDE AND PREJUDICE with the main characters from Austen’s Emma. I have never actually read Emma, but have seen the DVD of the same starring Gwyneth Paltrow. Try as I might, I simply could not recall all of Emma’s characters and had to rent the DVD to watch again as a refresher. But it was fun to watch and served its purpose -- to recharge the old “memory bank.” |
In this issue of True Review, I covered four books, any one of which could easily be made into a solid movie or TV miniseries. Why, oh why, doesn’t Hollywood take these books and make movies or whatever of them instead of giving us the insipid drivel, reality show garbage we are offered on hundreds of channels?
Ms. Bebris writes with clarity and style and gets an A for showing that a great story can be made without the violence, raw language and stupid, gratuitous sex scenes so common in our “entertainment” today. Regency England got it -- the flirt, the imagination, the “look,” the tongue-in-cheek humor -- much more seductive than the “in-your-face” version of today. Seductive reading, Ms. Bebris. Bravo!
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WINGS OF FIRE, ed. by Jonathan Strahan and Marianne S. Jablon. Night Shade Books (www.nightshadebooks.com), 2010, 499 pp., $15.95. ISBN 978-1-59780-187-4
Of all these classic tales in the WINGS OF FIRE anthology, it was certainly a lot of fun to read “The Dragon on the Bookshelf” by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. Also, it was a pleasure to look over and read again many of these classic tales, collected as a treasury of the best dragon fiction of our era.
THE ARK, by Boyd Morrison. Touchstone/Fireside/Simon and Schuster (www.simonandschuster.com), 2010, 420 pp., $24.99. ISBN 978-1-4391-8179-9
An archeologist’s father may have found Noah’s Ark, but is missing, with the only clue about his whereabouts coming from a man who dies at Los Angeles Airport – and the quest to find the truth begins.
NEVERLAND by Douglas Clegg. Vanguard Press (www.vanguardpressbooks.com), 2010, 288 pp., $15.95. ISBN 1-59315-541-4. A woodland shack on an island off the southern U.S. coast becomes a forbidden place, a key to an age-old mystery. Kids, of course, find it and are caught up in its mysterious past.
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INTO THE WORLD OF MIGHT BE, by W.A. Harbinson. BookSurge Publishing (www.booksurge.com), 2002, 2008, 167 pp., $13.99. ISBN 1-4196-7639-3
ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK, by Piper Kerman. Spiegel & Grau (www.spiegelandgrau.com), 2010, 298 pp., $25.00. ISBN 978-0-385-52338-7
RECOVERING APOLLO 8 and Other Stories, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Golden Gryphon (www.goldengryphon.com), 2010, 316 pp., $24.95. ISBN 1-930846-62-2
THE GREAT LIFE MAKEOVER, by Daniel A. Monti, MD & Anthony J. Bazzan, MD. HarperCollins Publishers (www.harpercollins.com), 2008, 248 pp., $24.99. ISBN 978-0-06-143540-9
THE DERVISH HOUSE, by Ian McDonald. Prometheus Books (www.pyrsf.com), 2010, 359 pp., $16.00. ISBN 978-1-61614-204-9
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