Fresh Pick | THE PLIGHT OF THE DARCY BROTHERS by Marsha Altman

Pride & Prejudice Sequel #2

August 2009
On Sale: August 1, 2009
Featuring: Mary Bennet
368 pages
ISBN: 140222429X
EAN: 9781402224294
Paperback
$14.99

Romance Historical
Buy at Amazon.com

The Plight Of The Darcy Brothers by Marsha Altman

A Tale Of The Darcys & The Bingleys

In this lively second installment, the Darcys and Bingleys are plunged into married life and its many accompanying challenges presented by family and friends.

With Jane and Elizabeth away, Darcy and Bingley take on the daunting task of managing their two-year- old children. Mary Bennet returns from the Continent pregnant by an Italian student promised to the church; Darcy and Elizabeth travel to find the father, and discover previously unknown— and shocking—Darcy relations. By the time Darcy discovers that there's more than one sibling of questionable birth in the family, the ever-dastardly Wickham arrives on the scene to try to seize the Darcy fortune once and for all.

Previous Picks

Marsha Altman | The Plight of the Darcy Brothers

My name is Marsha Altman, and I’ve written The Plight of the Darcy Brothers, a sequel to The Darcys and the Bingleys. If you have not read the first book, you can pick up the second, as what happened in the first book is pretty self-explanatory (after the second book, it becomes more difficult).

I’ve been a romance writer for ... well, okay, this is my second book that could loosely be categorized as romance, though I do say that loosely because there are no men with partially-exposed chests on the cover. It will probably hurt sales but it’s a good way to go in historical fiction. Jane Austen, even though she primarily wrote about romantic issues like marriage and ... getting married ..., wrote a lot about marriage is all I’m saying, and it was romantic, but it wasn’t romance. It was contemporary fiction. She was writing about the world she lived in, and now when we write about the world she lived in, we’re writing historical fiction, or historical romance.
Categories in publishing are confusing and mostly about shelf placement. Let’s move on.

The title may appear perplexing to some people upon closer inspection because, as anyone who has read Pride and Prejudice knows, Darcy does not have any brothers. The titular brothers are not Darcy and Bingley, as I like to give Bingley a little more credit than to consider him a Darcy by adjacency. In short, Mr. Darcy Senior, deceased five years before Pride and Prejudice opens, left some skeletons in his closet.

How I came to write this book is a story unto itself: I had finished book one. I was bored. I was either between classes in graduate school or I wasn’t given enough to do. A full day had passed. Then I said, “How about I write some more?” Not the most inspiring story, but it’s the truth. Things you do while sitting in front of a computer generally isn’t that inspiring. Maybe for book 3 I’ll make up a story about being attacked by a moray eel and how that inspired me to write Regency fiction.

Click here to read the rest of Marsha's blog, leave a comment or enter her blog contest.