The Literate Kitty

Every big city in America has its share of serious crime... but in a sprawling megalopolis like Los Angeles,  there’s your run-of-the-mill crime, and then there’s your okay-that-went-crazy-really-effing-fast crime.   In the latest entry in P. J. Tracy’s Detective Margaret Nolan series,  City of Secrets , Maggie—along with her stalwart partner, Al Crawford—are definitely ankle-boots-and-loafers-deep in the latter.     After arriving on the scene of what—at first glance—almost certainly appears to be  “just” another fatal car-jacking, Maggie and Al soon realize that the dead guy in the fancy car was actually the owner of a premium pet-food company worth millions... which he just so happened to be in the process of selling, for a huge profit. And  that  immediately puts a whole different spin on things.    Sure, in the part of town where things went down—one of those areas someone super-wealthy only goes with the idea of scoring s...

Los Angeles. Whatever you may think about it, it would be hard to name another place that’s home to so very, very many hopes, dreams, and ambitions… or to as much heartache, disappointment, and disillusionment.  Everyone here envisions their fantasies taking flight on a magnificent set of wings… but in The City of Angels, such wings are rarely given freely or won easily… and the scrappy, feathery bits that most of us try our best to cobble together? Never manage to feel like quite enough. And yet, we stay… and more come, from all over, every year: the dreamers and the schemers, the escapees and the seekers, the visionaries and the desperate.  (For a place that sees next-to-no lightning [ I mean, storms? we’d have as much luck wishing for a stampede of unicorns down Wilshire Boulevard, as we would seeing a thunderstorm ], we seem insanely hopeful, as a people, that those electrical bolts are gonna strike, and our dreams all come true.)  You see, we don’t cling to those...

One of the funny things about reading a series is that if/when there’s a longish wait between books, you can forget how much you like—and how much you’ve missed—those characters, and all the little details of their lives that you’ve learned. So it was with me and the “Monkeewrench” gang (which first appeared in  the 2004 book by the same name), and whom I’ve eagerly followed ever since. I’d check the web every once in awhile to see if a new book—the ninth in that series, now—was due, only to be disappointed. The wait is finally over, though, and—thank the stars— The Guilty Dead does not disappoint. The Monkeewrench team of cyber-tech experts (aka hackers)—a cobbled-together oddball squad of misfits who share, among other things, sordid/unhappy pasts, distrust/dislike of Big Government, and, obviously, solid geek skills—is intact, and still working from their “office” digs in one of the member’s fancy Minneapolis mansion. They still operate mostly on the down-low, al...

Much as I (almost) hate to admit it, I’m old enough to remember life before the internet.  ( Yeah, there actually was life, pre-Web... and it didn’t even involve horses and buggies. Imagine that .)  Of course, I also remember a time when there were no cellphones. ( Whoa. That’s like mind-boggling to anyone under the age of 30 or so, right? )  But here’s the thing—it wasn’t a bad life; you can hardly miss something which has yet to be invented.  We relied on telephones wired in to our homes and businesses, and we wrote a lot more letters. We also had considerably more face-to-face interactions.  That’s just the way it was... and the way it had been for most of the 20th century, actually. We all know what happened during the last quarter of last century, though. Technology underwent one of those phenomenal surges, resulting in an unbelievable amount of new stuff (and new possibilities). No longer is it necessary to conduct business during traditional hours or be t...