A Garden & Two Mysteries: Boom-Books Authors @ Work & Play

What are our authors up to this summer?

lavenderIrisCharisse Howard, who gave us the gripping American Regency novel Dark Horseman and the Britain-and beyond Regency Rakes & Rebels novella series, takes us on a musical tour of a botanical garden in “Flower Piano: a Regency Afternoon in San Francisco”:

“You don’t have to be a Regency fan to love Strybing Arboretum. But if you’ve ever dreamed of strolling under a parasol across a sunny greensward, over a rustic bridge, under a century-old magnolia tree, this place will light up your inner Jane Austen.”

 

torches
Carol Verburg is getting ready for the Killer Nashville mystery writers’ conference in August, where she’ll present two new works-in-progress. Zapped is Book 2 in her Edgar Rowdey Cape Cod Mystery series, following Croaked. Another Number for the Road is Book 2 in her Cory Goodwin Mystery series, the sequel to Silent Night Violent Night.

onlywitnessBy day, Carol’s madly typing. By night, she’s reading (or watching) mysteries. Her latest blog post reviews two unusual additions to the genre.

Pamela Beason’s The Only Witness is “an ingenious & charming mystery, starring improbably sympathetic characters”: an abducted baby, its distraught teenage mother, an out-of-sorts detective, and a professional “family” that’s half human and half gorilla.

houseofsilkIn The House of Silk,  Anthony Horowitz (creator of Foyle’s War and many books for children and adults) steps into the role of Watson to add his own story to the Sherlock Holmes canon. It “starts out familiar & promising—Baker Street ambience, unnerved client, deductive legerdemain, bristly camaraderie (Holmes-Watson) & sibling rivalry (Sherlock-Mycroft)—& expands fluidly into a web of business, art, society, & politics.”

Want to know more? See 2 Mystery Reviews: Beason’s The Only Witness & Horowitz’s The House of Silk.

 

 

Bastille Day Requiem

baldeagle-www.ozarksphotos.comThe Second Coming

by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

 

nice-attack1-620x411Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
turkey-coup-0715-cnn
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

Source: The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (1989)