July 2010 On Sale: July 20, 2010 Featuring: Mary Crawford; Fanny Price 352 pages ISBN: 0312638345 EAN: 9780312638344 Trade Size $14.99 Add to Wish List Mystery Historical, Jane Austen Buy at Amazon.com Murder At Mansfield Park by Lynn Shepherd Complete with romance, intrigue, and crimes of the heart, MURDER AT MANSFIELD PARK is an irreverent new twist on an old classic. Murder at Mansfield Park takes Jane Austen’s masterpiece and turns it into a riveting murder story worthy of PD James or Agatha Christie. Just as in many classic English detective mysteries, this new novel opens with a group of characters in a country house setting, with passions running high, and simmering tensions beneath the elegant Regency surface. The arrival of the handsome and debonair Henry Crawford and his sister forces these tensions into the open, and sparks a chain of events that leads inexorably to violence and death. Beautifully written, with an absolute faithfulness to the language in use at the time, Murder at Mansfield Park is both a good old-fashioned murder mystery that keeps the reader guessing until the very last page, and a sparklingly clever inversion of the original, which goes to the heart of many of…

Writing humor is not for the faint of heart. It is a difficult task for anyone – stand-up comics, sit-com writers and even those who produce comic strips. However, humor writing is the hardest for the novel writer because body language, facial expressions, tone of voice, funny drawings, and sound tracks are not available for use. Novel writers are slaves to the power of their words. The problem inherent to writing humor is that everyone has a different idea of what constitutes a funny situation. You, as the writer, can’t tell someone what is funny. Each person is unique and therefore, has a different sense of humor. There are even some people who have no sense of humor at all (I refer to them as humor-challenged). You have to realize you can’t please everyone, so you have to write what makes you laugh. How can you effectively use humor in your writing? One way is to make an ordinary situation extraordinary. Shake things up with a surprise situation or an unexpected result to an otherwise normal day. Play with words by using metaphors, similes, irony or satire. Bring misunderstandings to the forefront of the action and incorporate a bit of…