Lady Emily Ashton has never lacked confidence. In the deft hands of her creator, former Nashvillian Tasha Alexander, this widowed nineteenth-century beauty drinks port with the boys, studies ancient Greek, solves murders (including that of her late husband), and clears the falsely accused. In her latest adventure, Tears of Pearl: A Novel of Suspense, Lady Emily is as stylish as ever, and newly married to the handsome Colin Hargreaves.

Young fiction writers in America tend to receive their early training around the workshop tables of college creative writing programs. They next prove themselves in the minor leagues, writing short stories for the handful of respected journals that continue to print them. When the stories are good—as Tennessee native Kevin Wilson‘s surely are—the writer is rewarded with a rookie contract to the majors, which is to say, a big-name publisher agrees to put out a collection, with the promise of a (usually yet-to-be-written) novel. Tunneling to the Center of the Earth proves that Harper Perennial’s faith in Wilson was justified, but the book also illustrates the foibles inherent in the farm-team system.