I was a little sad that Blair was missing on a shoot somewhere. But then, Fair seems to be having some personal revelation that may bring him back into Harry's life - so good news there. I was also pleased that no more of the main characters were bumped off in this story. Near misses, but no deaths. I love Miranda Hogendobber.

On the whole, the book was an interesting idea - but a weak execution. 3 out of 5. I've been near Charlottesville, but never to Monticello. Now I have a bug to visit... thus my peeping in on the website for Monticello.

MURDER, SHE MEOWED has a particularly transparent plot--but even so it is one of Brown's more interesting entries in the "Mrs. Murphy" series, reacquainting us with all the Crozet residents (both human and animal) we've come to know and love and introduces one or two new ones as well. In this particular novel, Brown sets her tale against the snobbish Virginia steeplechase community, and when a jockey of questionable background is found stabbed to death in a stable the roots of the crime may be as close at hand as the local drug dealer or as far removed in time as an old missing person mystery. As usual, Brown writes with considerable flair and elan, and fans of the series will find MURDER, SHE WROTE a particularly enjoyable outing.

While I love Rita Mae Brown's ability to co-mingle the animal and human experience, I found her detailing of the incredible complexity of the fox hunting set to be more information than I need to read a mystery.

I love Jane "Sister" Arnold, the 71 year-old Master of the Hunt and her friends/hounds/horses, but the details in this book would appeal to only the most dedicated hunt fan. I did learn one good thing, however. Americans only hunt the fox to its den, not like their brutal British cousins who hunt to the death.

HOTSPUR's murder mystery takes a second -- or sometimes third -- seat to the machinations of the hunt season, the old money, the social climbers and all the ins and outs of hunt life. I suppose if you're a member of that set, these details and the constant fretting over your horse, your wardrobe and your standing in your club would make for good reading.

It just doesn't play in Peoria....or a small town in east Texas.

I'll continue to read Rita Mae Brown and hope she realizes she's exhausted the hunt and it's time to move on to other prey.

Not only is the argument completely ridiculous, as English isn't even a romance language and the grammar is similar neither to Latin nor French (from which her list of cognates is taken), but her proposition that English is the most powerful literary language is entirely ethnocentric (or, more specifically, linguacentric).

All languages have the ability to show shades of meaning. English does it with lexical differences because, as a language, it borrows heavily from others, giving it a huge pool of synonyms with various origins.

The bad advice is when she gets on to how to learn to write. For instance; get an English PhD. Try homosexuality, it'll give you something to write about. Be a Latin scholar. Read this terrifically large reading list. And so on.

I don't doubt the value of learning Latin, Old English, and all the rest of the usual English Lit coursework. But I do doubt the necessity of that to become a good writer. I wanted to improve my writing, and read this book early on. Her advice about studying Latin was seemingly good, so I studied it for two years. The good part was I learned a lot of Latin. The bad thing was I didn't get any better at writing. Her focus and arrogance on academia is annoying and misleading. I spend too many years there myself (in another field) to believe otherwise. But the lure of the degree is very seductive.

My advice on learning to write? Ignore all the writers. Except for "On Writing Well", by Zinsser. That's the only book on writing I keep on my shelf.

Another annoying aspect of this book is its lack of coverage on most important writing points. Character and plot are given a brush over. Agents and markets are all but ignored. A couple of literary forms, especially short fiction and non fiction, are given short shrift. Other than a few good writing exercises (which can be gotten from any website), there is basically no writing advice at all in this book.

The only reason I even gave this book two stars at all is that Ms. Brown does cover the subject of Latin, language development, and the reading necessary to a writer. This information is invaluable. If Ms. Brown could have controlled herself by staying on the subject matter, this book could have been one third its size and much better. Certainly, it was her editor's job, which goes to show that at least two people failed with this book.

Lucky me, I only paid a couple of bucks at my local used book store.

A student with a clean record would not be expelled for dressing up a statue with no permanent damage, even if the statue were a religious one off campus, as it is in this book. On W&M's campus, Thomas Jefferson gets a party hat and balloons every year on his birthday, and a pumpkin on his head for Halloween.

I don't think her depiction of life and attitudes in that part of Virginia is at all accurate, even for 1980, which is when the story takes place. And I seriously doubt there are several new car dealerships in Surry County (if any). The little details can make all the difference, and when they're inaccurate, the entire work suffers.

The characters are not fully developed and I didn't care about a single one of them. The writing was poor and the story fairly predictable. I found myself skipping over large parts of text and skimming a lot. The epilogue crams the resolutions of the characters' lives into a hastily written five pages.

Reading this was a waste of time.

This most recent book by Rita Mae Brown does make Rubyfruit look more and more like a fluke. I, too, don't understand the time setting of the novel, and it seems increasingly clear to me that Brown doesn't have a real grasp on what coming out is like for women who aren't beautiful, surrounded by wealth and opportunity, and don't have the pickings of any of the beautiful women around them.

The families are daft, but not in the delightful way that Six of One conveyed. They are wearing and tedious, and the dialogue full of wasted words. Characters make speeches to each other and nobody really seems to interact, not even the lovers.

I've stopped expecting another Rubyfruit or Six of One from Brown, but even so this book disappointed. It doesn't succeed as lit'rature or a romance, or a slice of life or historical perspective piece. It just doesn't succeed at all.

Since this "cookbook" claims to follow the 7th volume in the Murphy "lexicon" perhaps it is at best premature. Rita should have waited until after she had 15 or 20 Murphy mysteries under her belt before providing her fans with such nonsense. And exactly who does Rita think she is kidding by having the book printed in hard to read blue ink?