Visions of Sugar Plums by Janet Evanovich

Reviewed by Gerti

Janet Evanovich has the ultimate recipe for writing success. She takes a fabulously interesting protagonist, bail bondswoman Stephanie Plum, and puts her in the craziest situations imaginable. In this book, it’s a few days before Christmas, and Stephanie wakes up to find a man in her apartment. Not just any man, but a sexy sort of superman/alien named Diesel, who has the ability to open locks and seems to know things about the universe the rest of us don’t, like why a fugitive named Sandy Claws is having a hard time making toys this season.

While she is initially shocked and scared to find Diesel has gotten into her place, he is not a serial killer, but becomes instead Stephanie’s sidekick as she visits her funny family, led by her hot-to-trot Grandma Mazur, and her unexpectedly pregnant sister, Valerie. Diesel also accompanies Stephanie to the little shop in Jersey where Claws supposedly sells toys, and to other locales, like where little people/elves are hired as toymakers. No problem if large humans can’t enter. Stephanie has a friend named Briggs who is vertically challenged and owes her a favor. She convinces him to apply for a job, and together they infiltrate the organization, only to find that some other alien/super creature named Ring is after Claws and determined to shut down his toy operation. Diesel explains how it’s an old rivalry, but I don’t really care. What it is, is funny. I especially love where Stephanie gets attacked by elves. LOL funny.

I’ve read a number of books by Evanovich now, and you don’t read them to increase your IQ, improve your manners or increase your vocabulary. But they are great fun to read because her characters are vastly entertaining and appallingly unique. Her books are easy to digest and if there is very little mystery, or at least very little mystery that can be solved using normal human logic, well, that’s part of the fun. “Visions of Sugar Plums” is escapist literature at its best, but Evanovich keeps the comedy coming, and that’s what keeps me picking up her books.

The Suspicion at Sanditon (Or, The Disappearance of Lady Denham) 

A Mr. & Mrs. Darcy Mystery by Carrie Bebris

Reviewed by Gerti

Carrie Bebris has made her career turning the adventures of Jane Austen's beloved characters from " Pride and Prejudice", Fitzwilliam Darcy and his bride Elizabeth Bennett, into sleuths.  This series has worked out well for her, but like many of her fans, I wondered what would happen when she finished the 6th book in the series, since Jane Austen only ever finished 6 novels.  "The Suspicion at Sanditon" (Or, The Disappearance of Lady Denham) solves that mystery for her fans.

Luckily for Bebris, Austen left several fragmentary novels, and "Sanditon" was one of them.  So here, her husband and wife mystery team makes their way to the seaside town on the rise, Sanditon.  They meet the characters that Austen originally penned, Miss Charlotte Heywood, the Parker family with it's several peculiar siblings, and the wealthy widow, Lady Denham.  But here the mystery commences when the childess widow goes missing during a dinner party to which all the characters have been invited.  So many suspects, and much misdirection as several other dinner guests also go missing!  Finally, under the Darcy's careful attention, the mystery is solved, while romances are made (and dissolved!) and fortunes are gained (and lost!)

The mystery began many decades before when the daughter of Sanditon House's resident hermit went missing.  The girl's name was Ivy Woodcock, and while she is now the principle mystery in the village of Sanditon, she also has a deep connection to Sanditon House and its resident family, the Hollises.  The son of the house was in love with her before she went missing, and his father disapproved, of course.  So was there foul play, or something even more interesting?  The neighboring house, inhabited by the equally wealthy Denham family, is hoping to get a share of the inheritance, since Lady Denham married their father, now also deceased.  An a Hollis is also hanging around, hoping that the old lady will think kindly about the original residents of the house in which she now dwells, and return the place to that family.

Yes, there are many suspects, and the truth, as Bebris finds it, is even more peculiar.  Bebris' writing is wonderful as always, and really carries with it the tone of Austen's orginal.  Unlike so many authors, she can adopt the style of the wildly popular British author without getting bogged down in her sometimes convoluted syntax and antiquated terminology.  Bebris does a fine job of modernizing this work so it doesn't sound like another Regency romance writers has pounded it out, but what she can't help is that so few Austen fans really know the characters from Sanditon.  I've read all of Austen, but was much happier in the mysteries derived from "Pride and Prejudice" or "Sense and Sensibility" than in this less familiar world.  And there are so many characters in Susten's work that Bebris has to include them all, which made it all kind of confusing to this reader.  Too many Parker's, and too many Denham's, and how many generations do we have to go back to get to Ivy?  In short, I enjoyed the book just to hang out with Darcy and Elizabeth for a time, but would probably have to read it again to get every nuance straight, so it's probably my least favorite Darcy mystery set Bebris has written.

The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen by Lindsay Jayne Ashford

Reviewed by Gerti

So many books have been published that deal with characters in the novels of Jane Austen, a great British author who died in 1817, but very few of the Austen related novels deal with her life in a fictional way.  "The Mysterious Death of Miss Jane Austen" is one that does, and it is a very good book, one that might appeal to Austen's myriad fans.

Lindsay Ashford's premise is that not only was Jane Austen poisoned, which is what accounts for her untimely death at 42, but there was a serial poisoner in her family.  That person, whom the narrator, Anne Sharp uncovers by her own observational skills and Jane's clues, is Mary Austen.  She is able to marry into the Austen family through Jane's older brother, James, after his first wife dies.  And unlike her sister Martha Lloyd, who uses her knowledge of herbs to cure people, Mary uses her gift to ill them to further her own greed and lust.

Governess Anne Sharp meets Jane Austen in 1805 when she is watching the children of another of Jane's brothers, Edward, who was adopted by a wealthier but childless side of the family.  Hence, he has an estate called Godmersham, while his sisters and his mother are left nearly penniless after the death of the Reverend Austen.  Anne wonders that Edward lets his relatives be so poor when he has so much, but the key lies in Edward's wife, Elizabeth, who is too busy being snobby to be generous to Austen's family, whom she considers beneath her.  Elizabeth has other flaws as well, as Anne discovers that Elizabeth is sleeping with Jane's charming brother Henry, and in fact seems to have had several children by him, all while remaining married to Edward.

Henry is in fact so charming, that while he married a wealthy older cousin to the Austen's, he is also cuckolding brother, James, by sleeping with Mary.  it's all very complicated unless you know the family relationships (and yes, this book could use a family tree in it somewhere).  Mary supposedly poisons James' first wife to get him to marry her, although she is unattractive and a bit of a shrew, and poisons Elizabeth, in order to have Henry for herself.  Eliza (Henry's wife) also dies, and strangely, so does James, Mary's husband.  Now the road would be clear for Henry to marry Mary, but he does not, and that makes her very angry.  Anne realizes that Mary poisoned Jane whom she was nursing during that last month of her life.  Mary and Jane had never gotten along before, so it seems odd to Anne that Mary would be so attentive during Jane's illness.  Then she realizes the connection between all the other strange family deaths.

While this novel seems well written, it also seems a little implausible to me that the poisoner is Mary.  Ashford does float other suspects, like Henry himself, since he always seems to be hanging around women, and I even thought gentle Cassandra, Jane's sister, might be behind things for a bit.  But it's an interesting book that Ashford has written, even if I don't buy her conclusion.