A HABIT OF THE BLOOD

Best known for her southern-lite fictions (The Florabama Ladies’ Auxiliary & Sewing Circle, p. 5, etc.), Battle set this earlier melodrama in the islands. Her sophisticated heroine—a journalist/interior decorator!—returns to the Jamaica of her youth. As Kirkus noted back in 1986 (Dec. 15, p. 1813): “a divided family battles over control of a great Jamaican estate,” and the intrigue involves mobsters, drugs, and the CIA. A “languid” fiction, running on “tropical time,” it is, at best, “a high-class soap with some wonderful Jamaican color.” In short: better off in a mass-market edition.