Duty and Desire

While walking into a bookstore, I found Pamela Aidan's books that were a type of fan fiction to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice novel. It was supposedly, P&P written in the viewpoint of Fitzwilliam Darcy. I couldn't have rested after that without finding and reading these books. So began my search in the local libraries and I found them. There were 3 parts - the first part having 100s of holds; the second one half the number of holds and the 3rd one, not yet ordered. So I put the hold on all 3 and hoped they would fall my way in the right order soon enough.
The first one to come in was part 2 named Duty and Desire. This books supposedly recounted the events that happened with Darcy between the time of his leaving Netherfield (in a hurry with Bingley) and going to Rosings. If the fans of P&P would recall, there was absolutely no mention of Darcy's physical presence around the heroine of the book during this time. Therefore, everything in this book was just a random set of events that the author had come up with to fill in the gap between the 2 incidents. It had no allusions to the actual novel. That was a disappointment to me as I was genuinely expecting some Darcy thoughts. At times, there were mentions of Lizzie when Darcy was seemingly lovesick and those bits were sweet and romantic to read. But the rest wasn't very Austenian, but nevertheless, the author did a good job of providing an interesting twist to Darcy's life away from Elizabeth Bennet.
The gist of the story is that Darcy meets Lady Sylvania who seems like a good replacement to him instead of Elizabeth Bennet, but as days go by, she becomes more and more intriguing and mysterious. The mystery moves upto the point that Darcy starts suspecting her motives and feels that she is the one resposnsible for the evil air in the neighbourhood, confronts her in the end and Darcy realizes he has been missing Elizabeth Bennet more than ever.
So, on the whole, the book was an interesting twist to behold from P&P, but if you pick this book up with the expectation of Darcy insights, like I said before, would be a disappointment. But detach yourself from P&P before picking this book up.