Before the Darkness Falls

Continuing her saga of the three antebellum Georgia families featured in Savannah and To See Your Face Again, Price again mixes history and romance fiction in her facile, highly sentimental style. Natalie and Burke Latimer experience the first tragedies of their married life on the north Georgia frontier; Natalie's brother Jonathan drops out of Yale to marry halfbreed Cherokee ""Indian Mary''; W. H. Stiles goes to Washington as a congressman and later, accompanied by Eliza Anne and the children, to Vienna as charge d'affaires; back in Savannah, the Brownings cope with Natalie's absence and their son's challenge to elite society; and doughty Eliza Mackay's beloved Captain Jack succumbs to tuberculosis. Meanwhile, the South is moving slowly toward secession, although Robert E. Lee, a close friend of the Mackay family, here expounds on the evils of slavery and the necessity of preserving the Union. While all of thecharacters (including children) indulge in the Southern propensity for flowery conversation, the best chapters are those in which politics and the slavery issue are discussed in lively fashion. Like the proverbial spoonful of sugar, Price's solid historical research is unobtrusively laced into the narrative to give readers a good understanding of the state of the nation in the years leading up to the Civil War, where Price will undoubtedly take us in the next volume of the Savannah Quartet. (October 1)