I'll Love You Til Idie

Poor Joanna Carr! Six months in a catatonic state, and now she awakens to find that her ``perfect'' husband, David, is dead, felled, apparently, by the same villain who knocked her silly that dreadful night so long ago. As if that's not bad enough, after she returns home to Pennoryn, the cozy cottage she and David created together, she begins having these most disturbing memories of her marriage. Could it be that David was not the angel she had imagined? Could he instead have been a sleazy, porno-loving, masochistic fiend who tied her up and committed unspeakable acts on their marriage bed? And what about her horribly evil family, who're wallowing in an incestuous muddle of ignorance and abuse? Were her brutish brothers involved in David's untimely and violent death? Or is the perpetrator of that crime Joanna's noble childhood savior, Michael, now a successful and handsome artist? Who among this cast of characters can the beleaguered Joanna trust? Talk about melodrama! Talk about intrigue! Talk about a modern-day bosom-heaving damsel-in-distress story! I'll Love You Till I Die has all of it, plus the backdrop of the rolling English countryside, just like, as the book's promoters point out, Daphne du Maurier's works. Well, perhaps the rolling English countryside bears comparison, but that's where the similarity between the authors ends. I'll Love You Till I Die keeps readers guessing, but basically this is simply lightweight fun-the kind of thing that squeezes perfectly between suntan lotion and a glass of iced tea. (Aug.)