The Literate Kitty

There are many “constants” in life—things you can rely on to happen or to be true.   One is that whenever there’s a widespread emergency—courtesy of either man or Mother Nature—two types of people will show up. The first are those there to help. Doesn’t matter if they’ve personally been affected or not, they want to do good. The second type are those solely there to take advantage of a bad situation.  Both play their parts in Joshua Moehling’s latest mystery,  Beneath a Broken Sky .   If you’ve ever had the terrible misfortune to be  in  a tornado—or even just to be  near  one—then you  know . You know the unbelievable sight of roofs blown off, outbuildings and lawn furniture sent pinwheeling who knows where... or whole buildings blown to smithereens. You understand the devastation of downed power lines everywhere you want to go... and of decades’—or  centuries’ —old trees, shattered and broken beyond what your heart can comprehend. When...

  “Welcome to the jungle, it gets worse here every day  You learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play  If you got hunger for what you see, you’ll take it eventually  You can have everything you want but you better not take it from me...” ~Guns N’ Roses     Everyone  who moves to L.A. comes here for  something . Hoping to make it big... or to make a fresh start where nobody knows you. Maybe just to get far away... from  whatever  was left behind. Dreams and plans rarely go the way you’ve imagined, though. Fame can take years—or forever remain out of reach. Fresh starts without any sort of network of family or friends can be incredibly lonely.  And as for what you might’ve been running from, well... who’s to say you won’t be running straight into something equally bad? Still, even if how you end up doesn’t look how you’d hoped, it’s bound to be interesting. Surprising.  And sometimes, you might discover that what y...

It might be hard to believe, but there   was   life before self-driving cars were an option. Before AI and the internet gave us split-second access to  all  manner of information.  Before cell phones were practically glued to our hands. So let’s go back to one such “before”—specifically, the early 1990s—for a few minutes.  Grunge was taking over the music scene, and the number of channels on cable TV was exploding. And although we  knew  serial killers existed... for the most part, it was still in a “ stuff-that-only-happens-somewhere-else ” kind of way. Thriller master Alex Finlay leads us into that world—a quite ordinary one... until a serial killer starts terrorizing everyone—with his latest,  The Anniversary .   It could’ve been just another day in a small Nebraska town... except on this one day of the year—May 1, 1992—folks are a little jittery. You see, terrible things have been happening on this particular day for a while, now. Yo...

Imagine for a moment that you’re a chef—brilliant, by all accounts—until one day, everything goes horribly wrong. You lose your career, your family, and your reputation. (Oh, and also your freedom, because you wind up in prison.) The police think you burned down your own restaurant for an insurance scam—even though you insist you didn’t. So you do your time, and it’s not great... but because this is Iceland, it’s not unbearable, either.  You make friends with other inmates—and get to impress them with your talent, because you’ve earned kitchen privileges. And then you’re released... carrying the baggage of being an ex-con. Reykjavik Fusion  is the story of what happens next. And that “next”? Should’ve come with a big ol’ warning sign.   When Jónas (played by Ólafur Darri Ólafsson) gets a job cooking at an elementary school, he considers himself lucky; no one else had shown any interest in hiring him.  But when parents learn the new cook making such tasty meals for th...

  It’s the   end of the world as we know it... but only the super-rich feel fine. (Well, closer to fine, anyway.)   In an America that could exist in the not-so-distant future, every nightmare scenario has become reality. The oceans have encroached on the coasts, submerging entire cities.  The fertile farmlands of the country’s midsection have completely dried up—no longer fit to produce either crops or livestock—leaving them nearly-unlivable dust bowls. Unable to afford even the basics—ample food, safe housing, medicine, modern technology and equipment—and being refused government assistance, the general populace is stirring. Angry. Hungry. Tired. Restless.  Millions of powder kegs set to ignite. The government is well aware of the imminent danger—as are the multi-billionaires whose money runs all of the men in power. And those wealthier-than-Croesus individuals? They’ve been planning for this eventual outcome a very long time... building luxury bunkers for the...

What do you get when you pair a flunked-out-of-K-9-school-(on-his-final-test, no less) dog with a former-military-guy-(with-plenty-of-skills)?  If you guessed “the most delightful detecting duo in the desert” ( or maybe anywhere! ), then you’re on the right track.  (But if not, no worries—until the latest entry in Spencer Quinn’s long-running “Chet & Bernie Mystery” series,  Cat on a Hot Tin Woof , I’d never had the pleasure of spending time with these two, either.)     Things are going pretty well for both members of the Little Detective Agency. Bernie is engaged to police sergeant Weatherly, and Chet, well... even if he’s still unsure about Weatherly’s dog, is always happy when Bernie’s happy.   They’ve also seen a recent uptick in business, after solving a highly-publicized case. ( Great news for the treat jar! ) Unfortunately, much of that business is still divorce work, which Bernie, in particular, hates.  So, when a teenage girl and her ...