Amy had always wondered what it would be like to visit her Mom and Grandmas homeland. She had heard of her distant relatives, the place which was considered a majestic paradise and the strange folklore of a witch who eliminated her husband. More than all, she not only wanted to see but taste the rich, exotic food that had many times graced her table and been prepared by her Grandma Una. Amy longed to bask in the music that so often called her Mom and Grandma Una.

Four New York Times bestselling authors breach the boundaries of time and reality in these paranormal tales of suspense, intrigue, and out-of-this world passion… Futuristic lieutenant Eve Dallas ends up in a supernatural showdown with a seductive vampire criminal in J. D. Robb's "Eternity in Death." In Mary Blayney's "Amy and the Earl's Amazing Adventure," an ancient coin whisks an American woman and a modern-day earl into the past—and into each other's arms. When a city girl visits a Scottish castle in Ruth Ryan Langan's "Timeless," she is thrust into a romance with a mighty Highland laird. And Mary Kay McComas gives an unhappy wife a magic-carpet ride into an alternate reality to show her the grass isn't always greener in "On the Fringe."

This travel/mystery book starts as an e-journal of the six month stay in Paris of the mid-career, well-traveled Judith and Amy. Amy, a rocket scientist from Pasadena, California, is a visiting researcher at the French National Laboratories in Paris. Judith, her girlfriend and a professor of English at a Los Angeles area community college is on unpaid leave accompanying her. Judith, with the promise of many visitors and no special projects in mind aside from learning to speak French, has decided to write an e-journal to friends and family. Thus, the book is in an epistolary form, written pretty much in the present tense as it describes events shortly after they have happened, and includes photos Judith or friends have taken to illustrate various points. In addition to Judiths narratives and photos, edited versions of replies from her correspondents, which Judith was surprised to receive but felt needed to be shared in view of her commitment to community, are included at the beginning of each installment after the first. Overall, Judith appears only a semi-aware narrator, coming across a bit as an innocent abroad, yet, at the same time, is highly self-reflective about language and fills the narrative with word play, parenthetical references, popular culture references, high and low culture jokes, and philosophy. Overall, the tone is one of bemused innocence (or slight paranoia), and benign irony. Judiths task of having her journal be something besides the ordinary becomes simplified when, in time for the first installment, she and Amy happen to be at the sight of the discovery of a dead body in a canal near the Bastille. The same evening as the discovery of the body, Judith and Amy are asked by their temporary landlady to assist her in securing the contents of a safe deposit box in Zurich to help her ailing aunt. As Judith and Amy are heading to Zurich that week to attend the opening of a sculpture exhibit by one of their friends, it seems the least they could do to help this older woman. The body and the visit to the bank sets off a series of events that embroil Judith and Amy, Judiths French tutor and fellow students, Amys French bosses, their French friends, and American and other visitors in an apparent drug war. Since Judith is in France illegally and subject to possible deportation, Amy and Judith are forced to rely only on friends and their own ingenuity and interpretive powers to connect the clues and extricate themselves from what increasingly seems to be some sort of misunderstanding on the part of gangsters about their involvement in drug smuggling. The solving of the mystery makes up the narrative line of the text. But, at the same time as Judith and Amy become increasingly enmeshed in mystery, Judith has not forgotten that essentially her correspondence is a travel journal. So she continues to interweave descriptions and ponderings on the relationships among and meanings of popular culture and customs, politics, critical theory, science, religion, language, class, race, art, architecture, as well as adventures and anecdotes from previous travels with Amy, into the narrative. Even though Judiths paranoia colors her perception and interpretation of events and thus confuses her readers about what is real and what fiction, there do seem to be people following Judith and Amy and the clues Judith and Amy discover, all having to do with fire, water, earth, and air are undoubtedly real. Judith and Amys efforts to follow the clues, or to flee the implications of the clues, lead them and their friends to a variety of spectacles in Paris as well as the Parisian canals, fireworks at La Defense and la Villette, a night of fountains and fireworks Versailles, opera at Vaux le Viscomte, the beach at La Baule, in France, medieval Bruges in Belgium, and London, England before they solve the mystery and help justice be done.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith" by Dora Amy Elles. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

The first study of Amy Tan's entire oeuvre, with individual chapters on The Joy Luck Club, The kitchen god's wife, The hundred secret senses and The bonesetter's daughter. The book offers close readings of her work in the context of broader debates about the representation of identity, history and reality.