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VERTIGO
by Lauren Baratz-Logsted
Delta, September 2006
368 pages
$12.00
ISBN: 0385340311


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Emma Smith is the rich and bored wife of successful writer John Smith in London at the end of the 19th century. For the new year Emma decides that she will resolve to become a better person – but how to do it? Her husband has just finished a book on prison reform and he urges her to write to a prisoner he knows who, though in jail because of murdering his wife, is a good and decent man who needs to keep in touch with people of fine virtue.

At first Emma writes one-line letters and the prisoner named Chance Wood, doesn't respond as she thinks is appropriate. He asks her to look into her real self and be truthful with him. Emma finds she is intrigued and can't stop thinking about him. Thus starts his seduction of Emma.

After her husband assures her that no one else will ever read the letters, Emma and Chance start to imagine living together, and Emma now resents almost everything about her own life and longs to be in her prisoner's arms.

When John becomes intrigued that his wife is still writing, he asks to read the letters that Chance sends her. That's when Emma goes out of her way to lie to him by getting another writer she knows to post boring letters to her under Chance's name.

A year later, at the beginning of the new century, the Queen permits many prisoners their freedom if a leading member of society will vouch for them. Emma immediately forges a letter in her husband's hand and Chance is freed from prison.

After the two meet in person and lust flairs hot for them both, they try to find a way to be together. The only things in the way are Emma's husband and the good life they share together.

This book had hopes of being a literary, erotic novel but it falls far short. The author is Lauren Baratz-Logsted and I wasn't at all surprised to find out that she is a chick-lit writer. None of the characters in the story are likable so I didn't care about them. The author obviously hoped for an angs- filled end but the story resolves with a tepid finish. The erotic scenes also didn't do anything for me.

As I finished the book, I realized that I actually resented the time I wasted reading VERTIGO.

Reviewed by A. L. Katz, January 2007

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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