Reviews for Dante and Gentucca: A Love Story

The average rating for Dante and Gentucca: A Love Story based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-05-28 00:00:00 Brian Lee Originally published on my blog here in November 1999. The third Jacqueline Kirby novel is one of Elizabeth Peters' most outrageous. Setting a mystery at a romantic novels conference enables her to write several over the top spoofs of a genre almost beyond parody. Like her heroine, she clearly enjoys the bad taste piled on in such huge amounts; enough kitsch becomes fun. Yet there are aspects of the romance industry of which Peters does not approve, and which this book criticises: the deceptions carried out on the readers, the bad treatment of the only slightly less naive authors. (As in many genre fiction, most authors start out as fans.) As a crime novel, Die For Love has an easy puzzle, though it helps if you know some Shakespeare reasonably well. It is the background which makes it fun, along with the acerbic quality of Jacqueline.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-03-08 00:00:00 Alan Black Acerbic, clever Jacqueline Kirby has had it with her college librarian job in dreary, desolate Coldwater, Neb., and she makes her way back to the Big Apple for a romance writers' conference ' more as a vacation than as a future vocation. While she's there, Jacqueline witnesses the death of Dubretta Duberstein, a tabloid reporter-columnist who lets it be known that she is hot on the trail of serious ' possibly criminal ' shenanigans involving some of the romance writers and an unscrupulous harridan of a literary agent who calls her "Aunt Hattie." When Dubretta dies soon after touting her scoop, ostensibly of a heart attack, Jacqueline has no doubt that Dubretta's death is actually a clever case of murder. Die for Love is the third book in the four-volume Jacqueline Kirby series. The murder is well plotted, and I was totally surprised by the resolution. Always amusing, the novel is at times laugh-out-loud funny. Author Elizabeth Peters has no problem manifesting Jacqueline's bossiness, duplicity, and dogged certainty that she is always right, as well as Jacqueline's kindness and intelligence. She's a fun heroine in her own right, but Peters' send up of the twee romance novel genre really ices the cake. What a rarity! A book that's simultaneous a guilty pleasure in the form of a mystery and exercise in literary snobbery.