wednesday april 08
Trigger City, by Sean Chercover, was the other great recommendation I mentioned last week. It's a suspense novel that hits the genre bullseye: tough but damaged hero still fighting flashbacks to his last case, mysterious enemies arrayed against him, helpless victims he has to keep from becoming collateral damage, and the girl he wants to win back. Everything you need in a p.i. novel, with plenty of thrills and that essential spark.
Chicago PI Ray Dudgeon isn’t back to 100% after taking on the mob (Big City, Bad Blood), so he really needs the income when Colonel Isaac Richmond (US Army Ret.) asks him to look into his daughter’s death.
No one disputes how Joan Richmond died. The computer expert she hired for her company’s payroll department shot her to death, raving obsessively, and then committed suicide. It isn’t the facts of her death that the colonel wants to know, but more about his daughter’s life. Their relationship wasn’t close, what with his wife’s death and his own close-mouthed career in military intelligence.
So Ray goes looking. And what he finds is not the random violence of a paranoid schizophrenic.
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monday april 06
Saturday, 7:00 am: My daughter bonks her head on her bedroom wall while getting out of bed. This causes a 10-minute crying fit. Saturday, 7:15 am: She pokes herself in the eye. Another crying fit. Saturday, 7:30 a.m.: She drops her English muffin, butter side down, on her favorite Disney Princess nightgown. Major crying fit.
You can see where I'm going with this. The day didn't get any better. In my infinite wisdom, I decide to take everyone to the mall for lunch. My husband supposedly put the double stroller in the car, but when we got there, guess what? No stroller. Not keen on carrying/dragging three small children through the mall, we head back home. This brings on more whining. A short sample: "I'm hungry. I wanted to see the Easter Bunny. Can I wear my Cinderella dress when we get home? I'm hungry. Why can't we just leave the boys at home? Why do they always have to come with us? I'm hungry. Can I have some Chicken McNuggets?"
The terrible two's get all the press, but let me tell you: we've had less than a month of the terrible four's in our house and I'm already not liking them so much. Luckily, the library has quite a few books on dealing with my daughter's whining, crying and temper tantrums. Check out:
wednesday april 01
I’m beginning to need one of those little admonitory signs, the kind you see in zoos: Please do not feed the polar bears. Mine would read: Please do not recommend books to the librarian.
It’s not that I don’t love book recommendations (the polar bears would sympathize here), but I’ve been gobbling them up at an alarming rate. And two of the most recent recommendations I received were for the second book in their respective series, which means that after I read them and adored them, I just had to go back and read the debuts, too.
I picked up Tana French’s The Likeness because one of my colleagues said it was one of her top three books of 2008.
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