The Literate Kitty

When a fictional character is so familiar to you that they feel like an friend you’ve known forever, the author must be doing something (or, more likely, a   lot  of somethings) right. Vera Stanhope—the feisty, bull-headed, and frequently-irascible Northumberland Detective Inspector—is exactly that kind of comfortable-as-old-shoes character... and author Ann Cleeves is still doing her proud in the latest outing,   The Dark Wives .     After a young man is found dead in the wee hours one morning, Vera and her team are called to investigate. They quickly discover that the victim, Josh--found bludgeoned outside a home which houses troubled teens—was himself a worker at the home... and that one of the home’s few residents—a 14-year-old girl named Chloe—is now missing.    Nearly everyone immediately assumes the girl must’ve killed Josh—especially since the other staff members and teens all seem to agree that Chloe had been sweet on the college student—but V...

One of my college jobs was salesgirl at a shoe store.     My manager—smart, sweet, attractive, and never-behind-bars ( that’ll be relevant in a second )—was great to work with.     But, I  seriously  questioned her choice in movies.   Her favorite genre was a mashup of female empowerment and vigilante fantasies—women in jail, enduring horrible things, only to  finally  exact graphic, brutal revenge on the men that had hurt them.    Back then, I didn’t understand the appeal... but after finishing Emma C. Wells’ debut novel,  This Girl’s a Killer , I think—at long last—I’m starting to.     Cordelia Black has—from the outside—one of those enviable lives.   She’s attractive. Put-together. Healthy. Independent. Self-sufficient, with a well-paying job—Big Pharma rep—that easily funds her love of very nice things (Manolo Blahnik and Louboutin stilettos, and a collection of Louis Vuitton handbags).    She’...