It’s official! I love the Kindle App on my phone. I thought that I was a voracious reader before, but now I have millions of books literally at my fingertips. Also, contributing to my frequent book orgies, is the fact that many of the titles are reasonably priced (I can justify any impulse buy between .99 and 5.99) so I have been reading a lot more lately. I have also discovered a lot of great new authors this way. One of my recent finds has been T.R. Ragan, author of the Lizzy Gardner Series. The first book, Abducted, introduces Private Detective, Lizzy Gardner. Lizzy is the only surviving victim of Spiderman (not the beloved costumed superhero) but a serial killer who abducted and murdered a number of teenage girls in the Sacramento area. Lizzy escaped him but Spiderman was never captured. The murders stopped for over a decade, but now they have started again. Lizzy has never fully recovered from her abduction and neither did her family. Her parents divorced soon after her return and her father no longer speaks to her. Her sister, Cathy, harbors deeply held and barely concealed resentment towards Lizzy, but her teenage daughter, Brittany, is very close to her aunt. I have read a lot of fiction about serial killers such as Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Red Dragon. Those books have all scared the living crap out of me and probably left me with some deep psychological scars. Abduction was definitely suspenseful and it had some frightening moments, but it wasn’t overly graphic or cringe inducing. I really connected to the character of Lizzy. She has emotional damage from the abduction, but she is not a victim. She works hard to not let Spiderman and his actions define her. It’s a great read and fortunately it has a sequel, Dead...

September is a very exciting month for television. In the coming weeks, the major networks will launch dozens of new comedies, dramas and reality shows to be viewed and dissected by dozens of self-appointed media critics around the country. Since I’m not gonna watch any of that horseshit, though, I’ve decided to write about Quincy. Look, I’ve suffered enough in the name of New Television Programming. I spent two goddamn weeks in an S&M relationship with Bob Costas where he teased me with promises of Platform Diving and Who concerts and then slapped me across the face with a half hour preview of Animal Practice and the late fucking news. Seriously, NBC – when did you become such a top? There used to be so many different colors in the peacock’s tail and now there are only Shades of Grey (say it with me one last time, America- JUST SHOW THE FUCKING SPORTS! Man that feels good. God, I miss the Olympics. I wonder if Bob Costas is thinking about me. I know I’m thinking about him. His smile, his eyes, the way he spoke in wry tones about Rhythmic Gymnastics. I’d love to slather his head in Grecian Formula while he slaps my butt with a badminton racket until it’s as red and swollen as China’s sporting ambitions and we watch Water Polo together. Rio can’t come soon enough, except for the fact that the Brazilians totally aren’t ready. Well, hopefully Mitt Romney will be looking for a job soon and he can help them out.) So, clearly all this exposure to New Television has taken its toll on my fragile psyche (I’m a delicate motherfucking flower) and there were only 2 possible solutions available: 1. Stop watching television completely 2. Watch Quincy...

This week continues the detailing of my love affair with San Francisco. Every time I visit the Bay, I discover something new that I love, and always leave with the want to explore even more. In this blog I’ll tell you about the Palace of Fine Arts, the Golden Gate Bridge 75th Birthday celebration, and (for all you book geeks) the semi-secret Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour. Since my husband watched The Rock for the first time, he’d always wanted to visit Alcatraz and the Palace of the Fine Arts. We’d covered thee Rock on our first trip to San Fran, and were never able to make it  to the Palace on subsequent trips. This time, the Golden Gate Bridge festivities were so close to it, we made certain to check it out. San Fran is an architectural gem. It has a mix of every architectural fad in the last 150 years. And then there’s the Palace of Fine Arts. It was designed in the “Beaux-Arts” fashion by Bernard Maybeck and William Gladstone Merchant. It was originally constructed for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition, preserved by the Hearst family, and then mostly demolished and rebuilt to be more structurally sound in the 1960’s. Today it’s a beautiful park, with even more beautiful architectural structures that can be enjoyed by all. If I lived in San Fran, I can definitely see myself going to the Palace to read scripts, design costumes, or have a romantic picnic. Basically, it would be one of my “zen” places. It had the perfect amount of people in it (not too many, not too little, but just right) and it had wildlife. Ducks, birds, swans, turtles, etc; there was enough wildlife to keep you happily entertained by their antics. As for the indoor...

This past May, Sixkill by Robert B. Parker arrived in bookstores. It’s the thirty-ninth book in Parker’s Spenser detective series and I’ve read each of the previous thirty-eight at least a half dozen times. The day it arrived I hauled my ass down to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a copy. Which was an odd experience since these days I buy books almost exclusively for my iPad, and before that it was my Kindle. Flash forward six months and that copy of Sixkill still sits pristine and unopened on my nightstand. Why? Because Parker, dubbed “The Dean of American Crime Fiction”, died last year and Sixkill is his last. Between 1973 and 2011, Parker published nearly 70 books and almost all of them were bestsellers. He’s most well known his Spenser series, featuring the wise-cracking, street-smart Boston private-eye, which earned him a devoted following and reams of critical acclaim. (It’s worth clarifying that these excellent mysteries were the inspiration for the dreadful and unwatchable show Spenser: For Hire which eschewed the gritty character and ambiguity of situation that make the books so compelling for the cloying tidiness network television demands.) I’ve been a mystery fan since I was given a set of Encyclopedia Brown books for my eighth birthday. A voracious reader, I quickly finished those, then burned through all of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in no time at all. Since this was before there was a robust Young Adult market, I leapt into the grown up stuff, and quickly fell under the spell of mystery and noir. Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. I’d read them all by the time I became a teenager. And then, I found Spenser. I grew up in a safe middle class...