I received an email from Amazon today:‘
As someone who has purchased or rated books by Virginia Andrews, you might like to know that Daughter of Darkness will be released on 1 November 2010…
I have indeed read a couple of her books Flowers in the Attic and Petals on the Wind. But Virginia Andrews died of breast cancer in 1986. Since then the family have employed ghost writers to produce material for them to sell under the Andrews name. The story is that Virginia Andrews had written a lot of synopses before she died and that the ghost writers were simply following them when they wrote the books. I have always had my doubts about that, and, pessimist that I am, I always thought that it might just be a way to try and spin some extra money from the Andrews name.
Now, at a time when vampires are more popular than ever, in the days of Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, and a mere twenty-six-years after her death Virginia Andrews has written a new book and it is all about vampires:
Seventeen-year-old Lorelei Patio is the adopted daughter of a two-hundred-year-old vampire, Sergio Patio. She never realized why her family has had to move often or why she is not permitted to get too friendly with other young people…
It may be a good book and I am sure that it will sell very well, but things like this annoy me. Virginia Andrews-dead, and still writing books? Ian Fleming—dead, and also still writing from beyond the grave? Why don’t the publishers of these books release them under the names of the real author? Because they would not sell so easily. To my mind it’s all about the money.