Word: cora
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...Mulder's interim replacement. Amid continuing rumors that other Cabinet ministers might be caught up in the scandal, there was growing speculation that the unsolved murders of a Nationalist candidate and his wife during last year's election campaign were also involved. Robert Smit and his wife Jeanne-Cora were discovered in their home near Johannesburg, fatally wounded by guns and knives. Bloody slogans had been scrawled across the walls of the house, apparently to disguise the killings as the work of terrorists or a religious cult. The Pretoria rumor mill now has it that Smit, a financier by profession...
Celeste Chalfonte is the witty intellectual lesbian heiress, living with her beautiful young lover Ramelle in her mansion on the hill. Cora is her lifetime friend and servant. Julia and Louise are Cora's daughters, eternally at each other's throats and occasionally remembering they love each other. Julia, we eventually learn, is the mother of the narrator, a young bisexual writer. Evidently Rita Mae has now decided men are all right...
...style is uneven. When the dialogue is explained, it is sometimes done well and unobtrusively, but at other times the language sounds like a G.E. instruction manual ("Cora placed the items on the table...
Brown uses painfully obvious devices to fill the reader in on past events. Out of nowhere, a character remarks: "Did they ever prove that Cassius Rife killed Cora's father?" One of the cast marries a Japanese man. He is apparently the only Japanese in town. No explanation is given of how he got there. When World War II breaks out, we hear that his wife bashes a Fed over the head with an umbrella when they come to take him away to an internment camp. He reappears later in the book, casually, and again no explanation is given...
...Pollyannaish attitude towards the real problems of men and women. Having decided that men are O.K., Brown includes a few of them in her book; all except the evil Rifes (a family of villainous munitions manufacturers) are unbelievably sensitive and peaceable types. Whenever anything goes wrong, Cora, like Grandpa Walton, gives us a salt-of-the-earth piece of wisdom and puts everything to rights. The men don't betray the women. The women don't betray each other. If someone is crazy, he's harmless and cute and everyone is tolerant...