Previously on One More Bite of the Apple
The lovely Prudentia Chalfont-Smythe, chair of the Torquay Garden & Book Society is concealing a grisly secret. Not only is she plotting to assert Depew’s title to the Earl’s Estate ( Depew is the bastard son of Montague Pendragon KG, OBE, SOB, GMBH. Depew, raised by she-wolves in the less tony section of the Hartz Mountains, is embittered by the grotesque irony of living on the very property ripped from his grasp by a cruel fate.) Chalfont-Smythe, herself the love child of a disenfranchised royal, is ruthless in her pursuit of power, poultry ( for agricultural purposes), penury, pneumatic equipment, and, of course, the great prize, the earl’s dramatic forty thousand acre estate Great Puffinghammer, his lesser holdings, his business interests, and his desperate desire for literary greatness.
The Earl, unaware of Chalfont-Smythe’s despicable and wholly unsolicited emnity, devotes his days to the management of Great Puffinghammer, the citizens of Wellington Leg and Henley Hornbrook, the villages wholly owned by the earl’s Isle of Mann holding company, Gimme Re. It was on the Isle of Mann that the earl lost the love of his life, Dame Julia, to a freak oil rig accident. Shattered, the earl turned to writing for solace. He was the winner of the Snooker Prize for Voltaire’s Miasma, described by the Wellington Leg Intelligencer as ’shattering, as though Zadie Smith entered the body of Herman Wouk, before leaping to Aquinas by way of Bellow, with undertones of Danielle Steele.’ Nigel Newton, the reviewer, is regarded as a Danielle Steele scholar.
Thus, in summary, we find the tumultuous blog of serial suspense has only scratched the surface of intrigue, jealousy, stolen love, love of stoellen, ardent heaving, dark conniving, envy, sloth, multiple queries, some without SASE, plots, counterplots, savage revenge, and pluck.