I agree that even worse are the "Elizabeth Thatcher" follow-on titles you refer to (there are at least two of them!), which, as you note, purport to be by Emma Lathen, but clearly can't be since Mary Jane Latsis passed away in 1997. I'm guessing that perhaps Deaver Brown got the rights to the name/characters and not just the books - if such a thing is possible? And even more guessing/wild speculation, since you found Harvard in Deaver's past - that maybe he has known Martha Henissart (the surviving author) since mutual Harvard days, so maybe that's how he got the rights? I would have to assume that some other more reputable publishers like Open Road or Poisoned Pen Press or Wildside Press would have tried to get the rights too. (Keep in mind this is total speculation on my part!!!)
Since the Elizabeth Thatcher titles are KU, I started to read one of them, thinking it might be a nice series continuation - along the lines, say, of Robert Goldsborough's continuations of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series, most of which I've liked. Instead it was so bad (poor writing, huge injection of politics, minimal mystery plot) that I quit and returned it part way through, and I almost never quit part way through.
I did buy
Something in the Air at $0.99, to experiment with liberating and reformatting the text, since I would like to have better digital copies of the original books than the pdf scans of ancient brown-paged paperbacks that I made myself. But I'm still debating whether to give this person any more money at all - I may cut off my nose to spite my face since I agree with you and really object to what he has done.
BTW, I assume you are also aware that Latsis and Hennisart wrote a few titles in another series using the pen name RB Dominic? Not available as ebooks, but a few of them are available at fairly reasonable prices as used DTB (and some others are outrageously priced as DTB...).
Quote:
Originally Posted by disconnected
I wish this series had been acquired by a reputable publisher. The original books always seemed so meticulously researched and written it's awful to see them treated like this. I bought this one book but I don't think I can bear to buy any more of them.
I googled this Deaver Brown person and found this on Smashwords --
"Deaver Brown is a Harvard College Magna graduate in History and a graduate of Harvard Business School. He has been a serial entrepreneur starting with the Umbroller stroller in the 1970s, American Power Conversion in the 1980s, Pride Retail Systems in the 1990s, and Simply Magazine and Products since then. He authored The Entrepreneurs Guide through Macmillan and Ballantine, which later formed the basis of the Simply Business series."
The man has no shame. You'd think he would have expended a little effort in preparing the books before putting his name (prominently) on them. 
Edit -- He even seems to have added an additional title not written by the original authors as well as a short book about the "mysterious" authors; the content in the look-inside seems to have been taken directly from news articles written when Mary Jane Latsis died. |