Diana F. Von Behren

First Contender to the Mary Stewart Throne, Jun 20 2008

Susanna Kearsley's "The Winter Sea," is a darn good read. From the opening pages, her words flow like that of an old friend, lulling the reader into a comfortable sense of satisfaction that has one wishing that as the pages turn, more pages will mysteriously appear to allow this particular treat to be savored longer.

In the great romantic/suspense tradition of Mary Stewart--who in my opinion retains the grand old dame seat for positioning her damsels in distress with the most literary language and in magical venues that act as characters while crafting a plotline that withstands the test of time and achieves levels of sophistication and nuance that most of today's writers can't… Read more

A Sumptuous Box of Chocolates, July 26 2007

Think of free spirit Vianne personified in the film version of "Chocolat" by the lovely Juliette Binoche blowing into a small French village on the north wind, tempering the richest, darkest bittersweet chocolate, fashioning it into truffles rolled into powdered balls infused with her special brand of domestic magic and the sole intent of changing people's lives. Remember her daughter, Anouk, with the part phantom-familiar Pantoufle trailing at her heels desiring only a permanent home like any other child. Add to the mix four-year-old Rosette, a special child who doesn't speak, but perpetrates "accidents" that cannot be explained or ignored and change the venue from Lansquenet, the Midi… Read more

Intellectual Murder She Wrote, Jun 30 2007

In her novel "Ghostwalk" Rebecca Stott uses her experience as a professor at Anglia Ruskin University to write an intellectual thriller that toys with the idea that "history lies beneath the present."

The scene is Cambridge where at the behest of her former lover Cameron Brown, a well-known neuroscientist, writer Lydia Brookes ghostwrites a scholarly study left unfinished by Cameron's mother Elizabeth Vogelsang. Vogelsang found drowned clutching a glass prism purported to belong to Isaac Newton, the father of calculus and modern physics, was exploring the hypothesis that the former Lucasian Professor of Mathematics dabbled in the reprehensible field of alchemy. Vogelsang's death,… Read more