What’s Up
Well, tomorrow I will be! My flight over to San Diego leaves in the morning and I actually have no idea when I’m going to land. I should check that!
So far I have lost my ESTA, found my ESTA, finished packing, found things that have to go in the cases, panicked, sat on the cases, and now I am FINALLY done. If only from sheer exhaustion and the decision that if I’ve forgotten anything I’ll just buy it over there.
I’m getting my hair cut this morning. If I managed to get back in time before this is scheduled to go out, you’ll get a picture! My hairdresser is the best. She cuts well and all, but the main selling point for me is that she has these awesome happy bulldogs that you get to pet prior to and after haircuts. Sometimes during. They have a nose for someone that will give them butt scritches on demand.
The GRL schedule is up! So you can see that I’ll be Planning the (im)Perfect Murder with Jordan L. Hawke and Rhys Ford. You’ll have to see what we come up.
My Perfect Murder?
Random.
The easiest way to get away with murder is for the crime to make no flippin’ sense to the police. That’s why the trope of ‘murder swap’ is so popular in fiction. Despite all the advances in DNA and forensics (or sometimes because of them), a murder investigation still runs on what makes sense to the detective. The family is always the first suspects, because most crimes aren’t cunning and don’t have a hidden twist.
If the killer is someone with no apparent connection to the dead person, how would they even find Joe Bloggs to compare DNA or take fingerprints? I mean, I know how my detectives would, but… Not telling you! What if I want to use it?
In a book! Obviously.
Right, off to get my hair cut! Wish me luck. If I’m bald at GRL, we’ll know that something went terrible wrong!
Oh, and don’t forget (which I almost did), you still have ten days to enter a raffle for a Fire Tablet.
Book Rec of the Week
Yay! C.S Poe’s latest instalment in the Snow & Winter series is out tomorrow! Boo! It’s the last in the series! What are we going to do without our favourite cantankerous curator and sleuth in specs?
Rereads, anyone?
Anyhow, go check the book out now! Poe’s a great writer (an awful snitch, but a great writer!)
The Mystery of the Bones By C.S. Poe
Snow & Winter: Book FourIt’s been a full year since the mystery that brought antique shop owner and part-time amateur sleuth Sebastian Snow together with NYPD homicide detective Calvin Winter. Patience, sanity, and their very lives have been put to the test, but love has persevered. Although Sebastian is now New York City’s best-known busybody, he’s done solving crimes and wants nothing more than to plan a romantic budget wedding.
Then Snow’s Antique Emporium receives a decapitated human head in the mail and the holidays are gory once again. Sebastian patently disregards the mystery of a lifetime because he is done with death and danger—but the killer escalates. Before Sebastian knows it, his closest friends and family are dragged into a series of horrific murders with antiquated clues hinting to the infamous Victorian American Bones Wars.
The clock is ticking to recover a long-lost artifact linked to paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope and to capture a murderer. But it’s not Sebastian who may become the next target—it’s Calvin.
Left Turn at Albuquerque Road Trip Playlist!
Eldritch Jolene. ‘nuff said!
Deal of the Week
Speaking of Poe, the first three books in the Snow & Winter series are currently on offer here: Snow & Winter. So if you need to catch up on Poe’s backlist, this is good time to start!
Must Read of the Week
I was absolutely charmed by the Rebel Chef documentary on Channel Four. Gary Usher is charismatic, passionate, and an unstoppable force where his restaurants are concerned. He is also unassuming—always gobsmacked when things go right—and not afraid to get his hands dirty—I’m remain unsure why the tree stump had to be taken down but Usher but his back into it.
Prescot is the sort of town where people go to the chippy, not the bistro. Or, at least, that’s what people would assume about the place. Not Usher, who’s convinced there’s an appetite for good food, cooked well, on the desolate high street. Maybe there wasn’t before, but Usher’s determined to convince people to come and eat with him by sheer force of personality if nothing else.
I want to eat there! Next time I’m up in that direction I’m definitely dragging people over with me.
The Rebel Chef: My Restaurant Revolution
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi, reckoned the Romans. Always a new twist on a cookery show, say we. The novel inflection of The Rebel Chef is that our rebel is rebelling by opening his restaurants far from London. Up North, indeed.
Gary Usher has had quite a career as a chef, including a stint at Chez Bruce in Wandsworth and with Angela Hartnett in Camden but he has deliberately created his own restaurants elsewhere, not because he doesn’t rate the food scene here but rather the reverse. He seems almost intimidated by it. A few months ago he conceded: “Right now, London is not only the best place in the UK for food, but perhaps the best in the world.”
Speaking of writing murders…I am enjoying CRIMINAL on Netflix! It was a bit odd to get used to the conceit of it though. It doesn’t follow the usual rules—which are that you have to give the reader/viewer the evidence as you go, so they can piece the crime together with you. In this, however, the viewers are almost in the position of the guy on the wrong side of the interrogation table. You don’t know what the police know, what they’re bluffing about, or what they’ve missed. All they know is what they tell you.
Useless Site of the Week
I love this cat.