This is another series Judy enjoys and recommends. She's read all the books in the series so far.
A Grave Matter (A Lady Darby Mystery): Anna Lee Huber: 9780425253694: Amazon.com: Books Scotland, 1830. Following the death of her dear friend, Lady Kiera Darby is in need of a safe haven. Returning to her childhood home, Kiera hopes her beloved brother Trevor and the merriment of the Hogmanay Ball will distract her. But when a caretaker is murdered and a grave is disturbed at nearby Dryburgh Abbey, Kiera is once more thrust into the cold grasp of death.
While Kiera knows that aiding in another inquiry will only further tarnish her reputation, her knowledge of anatomy could make the difference in solving the case. But agreeing to investigate means Kiera must deal with the complicated emotions aroused in her by inquiry agent Sebastian Gage.
NY Daily News: A woman stabbed her teenage nephew in the groin during an argument over a cake in the boy’s East Harlem apartment early Saturday, police said.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
But here is is, anyway.
Worst Albums Ever Made
Daily Mail Online: A Massachusetts woman is facing charges for allegedly yanking the false teeth out of another woman's mouth and throwing a beer bottle at her.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
Jack Sher, Love in a Goldfish Bowl, Cardinal, 1961
And now it's the Church headbutt attack!
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
George Kelley reviewed this the other day, and I was tempted, not having read a book by Gérard de Villiers before, though I remember seeing some of them in print here in the '70s.
You might think things are bad in Kabul, and you'd be right. They might even be worse than you imagine. Gérard de Villiers had a reputation for knowing just about all there was to know about spies and spying. You can read all about it in this quite interesting article. It makes me suspect that pretty much everything in Chaos in Kabul is close to the truth.
De Villiers wrote 200 or so books about Malko Linge, Knight of the Order of the Black Eagle, Margrave of Lower Lusitia, Knight of the Royal Order of Seraphim, etc. In addition to all his titles, Malko is an contract operative for the CIA, and in this adventure he's asked to go to Kabul and arrange for the assassination of Hamid Karzai, who's become something of a drag on U.S. policy. An advantageous deal has been cut with the Taliban, who would like to see the assassination happen.
Complications ensue. Lots of them. Since you already know that Karzai is still alive, you know that the assassination fails. Everybody is betraying everybody else, and before long just about everybody wants to eliminate Malko, who is kidnapped (a couple of times), shot at, dumped in a well, and chased all over Kabul (and out of it). De Villiers' local color is as authentic as his information, as he visited all the sites of his novels for research. Besides the action, local color, and betrayals, there's lots of graphic sex, a feature of the novels, that goes way beyond anything dreamed up by Ian Fleming.
Reading this won't make you feel one bit better about our policies in Kabul, but it's entertaining to take a peek behind the scenes and wonder how much is true and how many of the characters are based on actual people.
Chicago Tribune: Three iconic toys have been inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame after thousands of votes from around the country: bubbles, little green Army men and the frustrating yet addictive Rubik's Cube.
Hardley Savage, Jetman Meets the Mad Madam, Bee-Line, 1966
NYTimes.com: Richard Schaal, an actor, writer and first-generation member of Second City, the Chicago improvisational theater company that sparked a new comedy movement in America, died on Tuesday in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 86.
Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.
There are two thriller writers whose work never fails to give me pleasure no matter how many times I reread their books. One is Alistair MacLean; the other is Jack Higgins. Not long ago I was in the library looking over their shelf of sale books, and I saw a three-in-one volume of Higgins' work. The books included in it are The Last Place God Made, The Savage Day, and Toll for the Brave. I have all three of them in their first U.S. paperback editions, but how could I pass this up for a buck? The answer: I couldn't.
The Last Place God Made is set in Brazil in the late 1930s. Neil Mallory is a bush pilot who's finally put together enough money to get back to England. Unfortunately for him, it's stolen by a prostitute and Mallory has to accept a job from Sam Hannah, another pilot, who has a contract to deliver mail and perform other services for the government. Hannah was an Ace in WWI, and he's the best pilot Mallory's ever seen. It's quite lucky for him that Mallory came along because he desperately needs another pilot to help him. Without help, he'd lose his contract.
What ensues is high adventure in the vein of a western novel, with the indigenous people this time being Brazilian. They've attacked a church, killing a number of nuns, two of whom are unaccounted for. Another nun, along with the beautiful sister of one of the missing women, shows up, and Mallory and Hannah are drafted to go to the church and try to find the women.
There's a lot of flying, plenty of fighting of all kinds (though I don't recall either Mallory or Hannah using a bow as depicted on the cover of the first Fawcett paperback). More than once in his novels, Higgins uses a younger man and an older, slightly corrupt, one paired together in a dangerous enterprise. It seldom works out well.
If you like good writing and just plain entertaining fiction, you can't go wrong with Higgins, and that certainly holds true for The Last Place God Made.
It would be impossible to imagine the popular music of the second half of the 20th century without the songs of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann. If you're the right age, you like so many of them that they're on the permanent playlist in your head. Here are a few: "You've Lost that Lovin' Feelin'," "Kicks," "On Broadway," "We Gotta Get Out of this Place," "Uptown," and on and on and on.
Now Weil has turned her hand to writing a YA novel, and while I'm far from being a YA, I found that I was the target audience for it. Why? Because it's set in the summer of 1963, and it's about a young woman who goes to work in the Brill Building with the idea of becoming a songwriter. If I'd had any sense at all, I'd have done the same thing.
JJ Green's parents don't want her to be a songwriter. She's supposed become an attorney, like them, but when she secretly applies for and gets a job in the Brill Building as an assistant to a publisher, with the chance to write some songs, they agree to let her. If she hasn't gotten a song recorded within three months, however, it's off to law school.
It happens that JJ's uncle, Bernie, has an office in the Brill Building. He's a shady operator, and he's been pretty much kicked out of the family. He knows the ins and outs of things, however, and he's able to give JJ some advice. Also in the building is a mysterious green-eyed young man to whom JJ finds herself attracted. And the cleaning lady, who happens to have been a very successful singer at one time. And as if things weren't complicated enough, there's a murder.
Like many of the YA novels that I like, this one has a lot of disparate elements that all come together in a satisfactory resolution. It also has the Brill Building and quite a bit about the music business in 1963. In other words, it's just about irresistible. It has a great beat, and you can dance to it. I hope Weil will write more about that time and place because I'm hooked.
Rare, ‘lost’ John Steinbeck story to be published this week: Steinbeck read the story on the air at the conclusion of one of Orson Welles’ World War II radio broadcasts in July of 1944. However, the story was never published in any of Steinbeck’s collected works or by any literary magazine or journal. Some scholars told the AP they’d never even heard of it.
Timothy Fuller, This is Murder, Mr. Jones, Pyramid, 1948
Shelf Awareness: The World of Publishing: 1991 vs. 2014
Here in Texas one of the down-ballot races was for agriculture commissioner. The Democratic candidate was a man named Jim Hogan. If you're not from Texas, you never heard of him. That's okay. Most Texans have never heard of him, either. There's a good reason for that. Hogan didn't raise any money, he didn't campaign, and he didn't run any ads in print, on radio and television, or on the Internet. He didn't do anything at all.
And of course he lost. Here's what's interesting, though. He lost by just about the same margin that every other Democratic candidate for statewide office in Texas did. Most of those others spent a lot of money. Millions. They had ads. They went out and shook hands. Hogan did none of that. He just stayed home.
Would he have done better had he campaigned? Maybe, but not enough to have affected the outcome of the race. Most of the Democrats lost by around 20%, just as he did. There's no way to make up a deficit like that.
There's bound to be a moral to that story. I'm still trying to work out what it is.
The Julius Katz Collection: Dave Zeltserman, Ed Gorman: 9781502706737: Amazon.com: Books The award-winning Julius Katz mysteries have delighted thousands of fans since first appearing on the pages of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2009. JULIUS KATZ introduced readers to Boston's most brilliant, eccentric, and possibly laziest detective, as well as his sidekick, Archie, a tiny marvel of whizbang computer technology with the heart and soul of a hard-boiled PI.
If you haven't had a chance to meet Julius and Archie yet, now's your chance to get caught up in these charming, delightful and very unusual mystery stories as this collection contains the first six Julius Katz mystery stories originally published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, as well as a never-before published novella, JULIUS KATZ AND THE CASE OF A SLICED HAM.
