CLOUDS OVER PEMBERLEY, Temptation and Temperance, is a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Reverend Mister Collins researches a new sermon which tests the marital fidelity of newlyweds Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam Darcy, Jane and Charles Bingley and others in the Bennet family. The sermon is at the urging of Darcy’s dowager aunt Lady Catherine de Bourgh who believes Elizabeth and the other Bennet’s are inferior in class to her and her nephew Darcy.

Collins’s research is conducted with the help of a tantalizing handsome young couple from Ireland that Collins assigns to entrap the Darcy’s, Bingley’s, and Bennet’s.  What George Wickham and his wife Lydia are up to is very modern. Also off-kilter are Elizabeth’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. It’s an 1812 Regency serio-comic romantic romp spiced with some of today’s looser morality. Jane Austen might think it a bit naughty, but nice.