In a recent item criticizing this season’s too-many-hits panic, I noticed that among the authors LAT reporter Josh Getlin was invoking was Robert Ludlum. At the time, I toyed with a crack along the lines of “Why don’t you throw in the new V.C. Andrews while you’re at it?”, but I wasn’t sure if there was a new Andrews, and I figured if there was, it’d just be a mass market paperback, so it probably wasn’t worth mentioning.
Silly me. Of course Andrews, or should I say V.C. Andrews®, has a new book out! And though the press release for Broken Flowers touts the $7.99 paperback, the review copy we got was a $24.95 hardcover. The novel, the first in a new series about an all new messed-up family, is out now, though I personally might have waited two months to tie it in to the twentieth anniversary of Andrews’s death, because I’m sick like that. Meanwhile, an Andrews fansite has an interview with Andrew Neiderman, the ghostwriter who’s been keeping the franchise alive, who reveals that each of the books takes him “four to five months” to write and that the possibility of TV adaptations is still out there—a miniseries at Lifetime, no less. Doesn’t that just seem perfect?