VICTORINE

Victorine, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Julian Messner Inc, 1958, 380 pp

 I thought I was done with Frances Parkinson Keyes bestsellers after completing my 1957 reading list, but it turns out there was one more to go. She went on writing novels until 1970 but Victorine, at #10 in 1958, was her final bestseller. She is not too bad but not good enough to add to my list of authors to follow.

  Victorine is a sequel to Blue Camellia from 1957, which was one of her better novels and is set in Louisiana during the time when rice was first developed as a crop there. In that novel Lavinia, the heroine, had two children who in Victorine are grown and ready to get married. Prosper, the son, falls in love with Victorine, an impossibly perfect woman. But Proper's fling with a Creole dancer at the local tavern involves him as a suspect when the dancer is murdered. 

 The solving of the murder mystery keeps the story going and saves it from being another dull romance novel.

(Victorine is another out of print bestseller. I don't know how I would have been able to do My Big Fat Reading Project without libraries.)