Julie Tetel Andresen

Impoverished Helen Denville is traveling to her new post as a governess,when she is accosted outside an inn by a strange man who seems to have mistaken her for someone completely else!

The man turns out to be the valet of one Mr Darcy who Helen recognizes by name as a infamous gamester (it should be noted that the heroine cant help but think this is an alias as will the reader)

After interrogating her the elegant Mr Darcy finally realizes that she isnt the person he is looking for.But her trunk does belong to the person in question.(there was a mixup of the luggage)

He proposes that Helen pose as his wife and help him flush out the original owner of the trunk.She agrees after Mr Darcy promises to pay her handsomely for her time...and she cant help but feel curious about what his goal with all of this is.

And who exactly is Mr Darcy really?

I really liked the no nonsense attitude of the heroine and the and the witty dialogue between Mr Darcy and Helen.

It was just something so comfortable about it,instead of having the two be constantly odds with each other constantly,thís couple actually works together. It was also funny how the supporting characters believed they were a genuine married couple since they got on so well.

I felt that the plot became a little more bogged down towards the end and also some too convenient circumstances occured,but it was only a minor nuisance since it was just a small part and the bigger part of the book was a very good read.

I would recommend this to readers who enjoy regencies by Joan Smith or Barbara Metzger,or just a plain fun regency overall.… (més)

I received a review copy of The Blue Hour (Timeslip Series #1) by Julie Tetel Andresen through NetGalley.com. The paperback was published by Madeira Books in December 1998. It has been published in a Kindle edition by Ms Andresen in January 2012.

The Blue Hour is a story of multiple lives entwined through several generations in rural France and Paris. The plot revolves around industrial espionage and the development of a quick and accurate urine test for cancer.

The story is OK but the science is not. Ms Andresen credits a Mr. K. of Glaxo Wellcome pharmaceutical company with helping her with the science. I don't know what year Ms Andresen did her science investigation, or how much time she spent with Mr. K., but while she is fine on the PCR technology, she missed some basic information about urine.

Test Early, Feel Safe is a cancer diagnostic that is used like a pregnancy test. It diagnoses various cancers using a revolutionary new way to strip genes out of the DNA in urine for rapid analysis (that's where the industrial espionage comes in). It seems clear that cancer-coded DNA would need to be present in the urine for the TEFS test to work regardless of whatever nifty analysis tools the protagonists invented. The problem is that the DNA found in urine is normal, even if you have cancer.

If you read anything about DNA testing, you quickly realize that your genome does not tell you whether you currently have cancer, only whether you have a higher or lower risk of getting it. Tumors are self-contained and while they may shed some cancerous cells (leading to metastasis) your body genome does not change.

For TEFS to work, abnormal cells from the cancer site, for example, breast or brain, would have to be present in the urine. But where does the suspicious DNA come from? Urine is essentially just blood filtrate and is normally sterile. DNA in your urine comes from bits and pieces of kidney and bladder lining and sometimes white or red blood cells if you have an infection. These cells contain your everyday DNA, nothing special, so analyzing them is no different from analyzing cheek or skin cells. If you have a bacterial infection in your urinary tract your urine will also have DNA from the bacteria complicating things. Even if cancer cells were present, say from bladder cancer, there would also be a lot of normal cells there too. You can't detect cancer from normal cells.

Detecting secondary products of cancer would work much better plot device than analyzing the DNA in urine. Secondary products of cancer, for instance the odors that cancer dogs detect, are metabolic products, not DNA, and lots of metabolites get passed directly into urine from the blood. We cannot currently detect tumor metabolic products in the urine so if Ms Andresen's scientists found markers that correlated well with cancer status, that would be slick.

I found a lot of the writing awkward and wished that Ms Andresen had had a better editor.… (més)