Shades of London

I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to be Rory Deveaux for Halloween. I already have the basic looks — dark hair, fair skin, round face. Clothes are no problem — jeans, T-shirt, vintage black velvet jacket — because they are my clothes.  Red lipstick? Check. Southern accent? Got it. Just need to pick up [...]

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Bye-bye, Spenser, good-bye

When writer Robert B. Parker died in January of 2010, I was still a couple of weeks from launching this blog. Otherwise, I’d have been one of the many remembering Parker, who created tough-but-tender Boston P.I. Spenser in 1971′sThe Godwulf Manuscript. It was the beginning of a long-running series that revived detective fiction, linking the [...]

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Cloudy, expect turbulence

Cousin Gail called just before noon. She wondered if I could do her a “teeny’’ favor. Remember how Caroline Cousins had a speaking engagement tonight? And since only two-thirds of us – herself and Cousin Meg – were actually going to be there in S.C. , would I, as the missing cousin, just shoot her [...]

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While my mom was reading

My mother’s been visiting for three days and already has read four books, two of which – Kathy Reichs’ Spider Bones and Nicolle Wallace’s Eighteen Acres — are still on my TBR list. As for me, I finished re-reading Dennis Lehane’s Gone, Baby, Gone and the terrific new sequel, Moonlight Mile, but haven’t gotten around to blogging [...]

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Nanook and Patesaurus

Around the turn of this century, a lot of people were talking about “the death of books.” Audio books were booming, and the first e-readers were making their assault, unsuccessfully as it turned out. I declared myself a Patesaurus, an obviously threatened species that would go to its grave clutching a real book, perhaps Sven Birkerts’ The Gutenberg [...]

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