Mysteries for Children

I don't remember reading mysteries as a child. i remember reading the Pokey Little Puppy and I remember reading Beverly Cleary's wonderful books, and then I discovered Nancy Drew books and while they were for girls, they weren't for little girls. I ran across this book, The February Friend, over at GoodReads. It sounds sweet and I have to wonder if it will launch some young readers onto a lifelong path of reading mysteries. How wonderful to be a writer that could steer so many readers in that direction. does anyone remember reading childrens' mysteries as a kid? Anything stand out?

The Doomsday Equation by Matt Richtel

I review Matt Richtel's techno-thriller The Doomsday Equation over at Criminal Element today. Check it out here

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March reading list: March Violets by Philip Kerr

If you haven't read Philip Kerr's March Violets--the first of his Bernie Gunther mysteries, you should put it on your TBR list. Set in 1936, it is the first of what the author called his "Berlin Noir" trilogy. The story takes place during the Summer Olympics of that year. the book was published more than 25 years ago, but remains a terrific read.

COMING IN MARCH!! The return of Kattomic Energy

Yes, the blog has been off-line since last fall but now, in the creative Year of the Ram, it has been re-energized. And reincarnated with a slightly different focus--as a mystery site, with reviews and other mystery musings. Now that I'm in Bellingham, WA--home of one of the country's great bookstores, Village Books, I will be part of a new Mystery Readers Group and hope to involve my fellow readers and writers in that enterprise as well. And this will also give me an opportunity to indulge my love for Etsy. Because there are people out there like Pattie Tierney who designs really cool mystery-themed jewelry. Check her out here. I am particularly fond of this Trixie Belden bracelet.

As Rachel Maddow would say, "Watch this space."

Spiders on My Mind

I grew up in a house where spiders also lived. We were outnumbered by the eight-legged inhabitants, but mostly we adhered to a “don’t bite, don’t kill” policy in and everyone coexisted in the way humankind has been co-existing with house spiders since at least the time of the Roman empire. If a spider drifted across no man’s land and ended up in the bathtub well, then, the spider had to suffer the consequences and was quickly washed down the drain, or scooped up in a wad of toilet tissue and flushed. I learned early you had to sort of pinch the wad of tissue if you didn’t want the spider crawling out of its paper prison and looking up at you with its eight beady eyes. I don’t remember who was the designated spider-killer in my house. My father was a combat veteran who’d grown up on a farm, my mother was the product of a Depression childhood. Both were tough, unsentimental, and fearless. We also had a cat that saw bugs as wonderfully interactive toys. With my parents and the cat on the case, an errant spider didn’t have much of a chance. But despite everything, some spiders still skittered their way into my little sister’s room. She was irrationally afraid of spiders, phobic in a way that was easy to exploit—Stay out of my closet, there are spiders in there—but hard to soothe. The spider’s dead. I killed it. Really. Somehow when there was a spider in my sister’s room, I was always the only other person who was home, so if there was spider killing to be done, it was my job. I didn’t embrace the role of spider-bane but I didn’t shrink from it either. I discovered that a spider’s blood is blue. I thought that was fascinating. I found myself wishing we could dissect a spider in biology. I’d read that spiders have hearts, things that look like tubes that only push the blood one way. I imagined something like those little pliable tubes you use to remove the skins from garlic cloves. I thought eviscerating a spider would be much more interesting than dissecting the cow’s eye we were given in freshman biology. And a lot less icky. (And don’t get me started on the fetal cat corpse we were presented with later in the year.) But spiders…I am fascinated by spiders. In the short story I’m publishing on Halloween, “Unsanctified,” I have created a group called “The Sisterhood of the Red Spider.” As you can imagine, they are a group to be reckoned with. And to lend the story some paranormal plausibility, I did a fair amount of research on spiders. I knew that in some cultures—Native American and African, for instance—revere the spider as a symbol of wisdom but I was curious to see how other cultures had viewed the spider throughout history. But I kept getting distracted by articles like this one on Three ways to draw a spider web from WikiHhow,

Sexism dies hard....

I saw this on Twitter today and you know, at first I thought it was kind of funny. But then I saw the comment by the person who posted it and it was something along the lines of, "Seems legit." And that hit me wrong. It just seemed so last century somehow, this idea that women are just about the shoes. I prefer to see Dorothy in a different light. So on further consideration, this kind of makes me cranky. Shoes...

I don't like spiders and snakes

I am putting the final touches on UNSANCTIFIED, the long story I'm posting for Halloween, and doing some research on spiders. Spiders don't actually freak me out as they do many people, but my sister was once bitten by a brown recluse and the results weren't pretty. (Literally. Turns out there are a lot of photographs of spider bites on the Internet and they're graphic enough to make you want to don HazMat gear every time you go into your back yard.) For my story I invented a group called "the Sisterhood of the Red Spider" and I spent a fair amount of time looking for a photo of a red spider.

The first time I looked, I mostly got manga images and spiders that were sort of reddish if you squinted and looked at them out of the corner of your eye. And then I ran across this bad boy. It looks like the radioactive spider that bit Peter Parker. It looks like a creature you want to stay far, far away from. It's exactly what I was looking for.