Venice In Dora Benley Novels:
Dora Benley visits Venice in two very different novels. There is the supernatural young adult novel Back To Venice and the historical thriller in the Edward Ware Thrillers at War Series called Armistice Plot about World War 1 and Hitler’s rise to power.
In Back to Venice eighteen year old Alexandra Banks yawns and stretches as she asks her chauffeur where they are. Charles says the Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego. Alexandra thinks it looks like Venice with all the canals, gondolas, and gondoliers in Italian Renaissance and medieval costumes. They were there just last week with her high roller parents. Charles tells her it is California make believe like Disneyland. He points out at sign that advertises gondola rides on the Coronado Cays. But Alexandra isn’t sure when the costumed gondoliers begin to stare at her.
She knows something very strange is going on when she takes a ride in a gondola and steps out into what is obviously Venice. But it is not the Venice of today but of hundreds of years ago. Passers by gawk at her. They are suspicious of her twenty-first century clothes and her cell phone. She is quickly arrested and put on trial for her life as a witch. How did Alexandra get into such a fix to begin with? What is going on? How does she escape? She had better figure it out soon or she may never emerge from the nightmarish Middle Ages and get back to her real life again.
The novel Armistice Plot begins at an archaeological site at Carchemish in 1914 as Edward Ware’s father and Leonard Woolley close down their dig in the face of war. As Edward peers into the tent at midnight he sees a dark-robed intruder brushing past the figurine of an ancient Hittite king that he and T.E.Lawrence excavated at Carchemish this summer in 1914.
Is this a spy sent by the Germans to steal the maps Lawrence is sketching for the British military? Edward first encounters the vamp who will haunt the rest of his life prowling among the finds, looking for the military maps that his fellow archaeologist T. E.Lawrence is drawing for the British government.
All during the ensuing Great War Edward must fight to keep the maps secret. Finally during the Battle of Damascus Edward and Lawrence defeat the Turks and make them sue for peace. They will sign the Armistice ending the war. But the vamp, though imprisoned in Damascus, escapes. Edward must chase her down all the way to Venice.
There are hints that she is fleeing to join with the Austrian corporal, Adolf Hitler, who is beginning a new movement in Munich. Signs of a new war appear on the horizon though the first has just come to an end with an Armistice that isn’t worth the paper it is written on.
This is an historical thriller about Edward’s contest to the death first with the German Kaiser and then with Hitler himself. It will determine the woman he will marry and the woman he will not. It will drive him to the brink of madness in a century gone insane.
