September 2013 archive

Even sillier Spam incoming.

And I notice that in the past couple of weeks I’ve been inundated by a slightly different spam type. This all in a frenzied spate of French. Since I speak – and read – no French it’s a complete waste of time sending it to me. It appears to come from a list of women’s …

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STRANGE LUCKY HALLOWEEN ed. Jean M. Goldstrom, asst.ed. Sandi Reed-Chan

softcover, published Whortleberry PressSeptember 2013.  16 stories.                     reviewed by Steve Johnson. Another interesting anthology from Whortleberry. I grabbed this the day after it arrived and read it yesterday, writing this review while Glen took her turn at reading it. This bunch of stories adds up the same way as an increasing number of Whortleberry …

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A Bee in a Bonnet

I was in the kitchen with my house manager when there was a loud buzzing and we became aware that we had a companion – a large irked bumble bee. I grabbed for the bee-jar just as the bee vanished iunder the sideboard. My house manager took the jar from me, dropped to her knees …

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Luisa is Many things to many people.

Back in the 1980s, I started writing a series of mystery tales about Deetctive-Lieutenant Luisa Garcia of the Los Angeles Burglary and Homicide Squad. Over the 1990s I sold a number of them to a small USA print magazine, but even when that market collapsed on me, I continued to write another Luisa Garcia story …

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The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party by Alexander McCall Smith.

An excellent read as ever and I’ve ordered the next. In this book Precious Ramotswe is approached by a farmer who complains that two of his cattle have been horribly slaughtered and he wants to know who and why. And while Precious never quite discovers who did the deed she does succeed in stopping further …

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KNOCK DOWN by Sarah Graves.

Bantam paperback. Published January 2012. 15th in the Home Repair is Homicide series. I started reading this series back in 2001 when I was staying with Andre Norton and she recommended it very strongly. I went right to the nearest bookstore and bought the first three that were out in the series, read them, and …

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Wow, Gales!

and they certainly were. Although they could have been worse, we didn’t lose power as half the South island did, and we had only 28mls – just over an inch- of rain, not the flooding others had. But it was a wild couple of days. I was watching the 6pm news on TV Wednesday when …

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Yes, book contracts signed…

Last month I was offered a contract for my Sherlock Holmes new (14) short stories collection. REPEAT BUSINESS is now my first book sale for 2013. There is a suggestion that it may be offered to Large Print markets in the UK too. Not as a single collection, but as a duo since they prefer …

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Was He Picked On?

I see on TV this morning that Michael le Vell of Coronation Street fame was acquitted of rape and assault charges after the jury deliberated a bare four (or five, reports claim both)   hours. And when you add in going out to the jury room, sorting out who’s sitting where, hearing from the court …

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Possible Book sale

Some time ago I re-read my volume of the collected Sherlock Holmes short stories. Around the same time I received a fanzine on that subject and the two things, along with one or two other items promptly set off the sort of chain reaction that such events can in the writer’s subconscious. Over the next …

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