It's almost forty years after the events of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Jim Hawkins now runs an inn called Hispaniola on the English coast with his son, Jim, and Long John Silver has returned to England to live in obscurity with his daughter, Natty. Their lives are quiet and unremarkable; their adventures have seemingly ended. But for Jim and Natty, the adventure is just beginning. One night, Natty approaches young Jim with a proposition: return to Treasure Island and find the remaining treasure that their fathers left behind so many years before.
1898. New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry well-to-do Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the Martian invasion featured in H.G. Well's popular novel The War of the Worlds. Meanwhile in London, Wells is unexpectedly made privy to certain objects, apparently of extraterrestrial origin, that were discovered decades earlier on an ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic. On that same expedition was an American crew member named Edgar Allan Poe, whose inexplicable experiences in the frozen wasteland would ultimately inspire him to create one of his most enduring works of literature. When eerie, alien-looking cylinders begin appearing on the outskirts of London, Wells is certain it is all part of an elaborate hoax. But soon, to his great horror, he realizes that a true invasion of the earth has indeed begun.
Author Gretchen Waters made a name for herself with her bestseller Tammyland--a memoir about her divorce and her admiration for country music icons Tammy Wynette, Loretta Lynn, and Dolly Parton that was praised as a "honky-tonk Eat, Pray, Love." But her writing career is cut abruptly short when she dies from a fall down a set of stone library steps. It is a tragic accident and no suspects foul play, certainly not Gretchen's best friend from college, Jamie, who's been named the late author's literary executor. But there's an unfinished manuscript Gretchen left behind that is much darker than Tammyland: a book ostensibly about male country musicians yet centered on a murder in Gretchen's family that haunted her childhood. In its pages, Gretchen seems to be speaking to Jamie from beyond the grave--suggesting her death was no accident and that Jamie must piece together the story someone would kill to keep untold.
No comments:
Post a Comment