City of Dragons by Kelli Stanley

I have been a fan of Kelli Stanley's wonderful historical mysteries since my friend Cormac Brown gave me a copy of her "Roman noir" Nox Dormienda. When Kelli came to Los Angeles to sign the first book of her San Francisco-based historical mysteries, City of Dragons, I bought a copy and had it autographed. I loved the book and have since read two of the three sequels. The heroine is Miranda Corbie, a private eye with a past and a passion for justice.

I recommended City of Dragons to the book club I belong to in Bellingham--the Bellingham Mysterians--join us on Facebook--and it looks like this one is a winner. (We don't always agree on the books we read.) If you love historical mysteries with social issues wrapped up in the plot, you will LOVE these books. And if you love elegant book covers, the whole series has wonderful covers.

The Angel Artifact

Sometimes you get a story bunny that just will not leave you alone, no matter how often you push it aside. The last time that happened to me was when the "Vampire Cinderella" idea pushed me to write Bride of the Midnight King.  I know where this one came from--hours spent refining my entry into the "Be James Patterson's co-author" contest, along with thinking about under-used supernatural beings in paranormal books.
The idea is that a little kid, a girl, I think, finds an angel feather in the woods. It's big--bigger than she is, anyway, and looks like a piece of brushed steal sculpture until you touch it. She brings the angel back home and takes it upstairs to show it to her little brother, a kid with some congenital and fatal disease who is bed-bound. And when he touches it,he's healed.
And consequences ensue.
I figure there are several of these angel feather artifacts scattered all over the world and some have been used for harming as well as healing.
How do you destroy such an artifact? It's not like you can throw it into the fires of Mt. Doom.
And of course, word of this object would get out.
And the government would probably get involved.
Maybe now that I've written this much down, the idea will be happy to sit in the back of my unconscious.
i know there's something there, but not sure what to do with it.

Sunday Shakespeare Goodness--Helen Mirren's TEMPEST for free

I've seen a lot of productions of Shakespeare's The Tempest. I've seen a Comnedia dell'arte production iperformed solely n Italian during the a cultural "Olympics" that accompanied the 1984 L.A. Summer Olympics, I've seen a production in San Diego with three oversized seashells as the only set (Ellis Rabb played Prospero) and I've seen two more traditional versions, one with Anthony Hopkins and Stephanie Zimbalist and one with Christopher Plummer as the vengeful mage.

When I found out Helen Mirren was going to do a female version of the play with Julie (The Lion King) Taymor directing, I was intrigued but somehow I never managed to catch the 2010 production. But now, thanks to YouTube, I can see the whole movie for free! It was worth the wait. Djimon Hounsou plays Caliban, who has the best line in the play (and one of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare) when he says, "You taught me language and my profit on't is I know how to curse." 
This was Shakespeare's last play, the culmination of a career, a master at the top of his game.
Enjoy it here.

Finding Clarity, Setting Goals

Yet another book for the TBR pile. I'm always looking for ways to map out the path of my life because there have been long stretches where it feels like I've been wandering down random paths in search of something. This book has been recommended to me by a number of people, so my first goal is to sit down and read it.

Nuclear sun over Bellingham

Photo by Shay Y. Roberts

Most of the time, Bellingham is silver and green. But sometimes, when the light is just right, the city is bathed in molton gold.

Henry Rollins has something to say and it's worth listening to

One of my favorite Henry Thoreau quotes has to do with not wasting time--"as if you could waste time without injuring eternity." Who knew that Henry Rollins and Henry Thoreau were brothers under the skin? Wonder what kind of a tattoo Thoreau would have gotten if he was the kind of guy who got inked?

Angelfall by Susan Ee--a review

In a post-apocalyptic world, a human joins forces with an angel to rescue her little sister as a resistance movement launches its first mission against the supernatural creatures.

Definitely in the dystopian tradition of Hunger Games, this story of a world in which paranormal creatures rule the night has a fine, feisty heroine, an intriguing anti-hero angel without wings and a quest. It’s well-written but derivative (especially for readers of the genre in general and Hunger Games in particular).

PENRYN YOUNG is 17 and basically in charge of her family—her mentally ill mother and her disabled sister PAIGE—in the wake of world-wide apocalypse involving angel attacks. Everyone on earth saw GABRIEL, the Messenger of God, killed in Jerusalem and since then, angels have hunted and killed humans for their own uses.

            Penryn is uniquely suited to protect her family since her paranoid mother signed her up for a series of self-defense classes. That’s good because her mother is off her meds and unpredictable and her sister is useless. The family has been hiding out on the top floor of an apartment building, but the bands of roving gangs have been scavenging closer and closer for days. Penryn realizes it’s time to move and despite her mother’s terror of the night (when the streets are empty of humans but filled with all kinds of predators), she wants to move at night. With her mother pushing a shopping cart and Penryn pushing her baby sister in a wheelchair, the trio sets out.