The Literate Kitty

There aren’t many constants out there in the world, but one which seems to always hold true is that all of us will never really, truly , get along with each other. Pessimistic, you say? Okay, fine... guilty as charged. Still, history argues pretty persuasively against the likelihood of any sort of widespread, lasting peace. From the days when cavemen stomped the Earth--when the males battled each other with clubs over who got the biggest hunk of meat from a hunt (survival), or got to claim the healthiest cavewoman (both survival and power), to today--when we still fight over survival and power, plus a whole mess of other things, we’ve proven ourselves to be quite the warmongering species. So, just imagine what life on Terra Firma would be like if we threw zombies, vampires, werewolves, shapeshifters, etc., into the mix. (One big party? Um, yeah, not so much.) Last year we were introduced to just such a mix in Nancy Holzner’s Urban Fantasy Deadtown , the title of which refers to the spe...

A sprawling estate in the English countryside.    A wealthy family, bound by the secrets they hide from their friends and neighbors.    And an engagement party, with the usual sorts in attendance.   Pompous gentlemen of a certain age. Mothers eager to make the best matches for their daughters. Preening dandies too aware of their own highly-eligible status... and giddy young women swooning after them.    But in the middle of all the merriment, the groom-to-be takes off, breaking his engagement without explanation and leaving behind a tearful.  It could’ve been plucked from a Jane Austen novel, except for one more thing... a pesky little murder (which the very proper Ms. Austen certainly never wrote about). Newcomer Anna Dean, on the other hand, gleefully tosses the murder of a mysterious young woman into the mix in  Bellfield Hall , resulting in a Jane Austen-meets-Miss Marple mashup.    When a distraught Catherine Kent summons her f...

Danger takes many forms. Most of us—once we’ve become rather uncomfortably aware of our own mortality—make an effort to take at least a few precautions to ward ourselves from some of the dangers we face.  At a bare minimum, we look both ways before crossing the street.  We inoculate ourselves against deadly diseases.  We bolt our doors and lock our windows to all the scary things (and bad people) that go bump in the night.  We fasten our seat belts before setting out on the roadways in our little hunks of metal .  Taking such measures is empowering; we’re proactively doing something to safeguard ourselves. So many other things, of course, are completely outside the realm of our control.  We’re unable to prevent cancers or illnesses that we’re genetically predisposed to getting.  We’re at the whims of Mother Nature when it comes to floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, and such.  We can’t predict if a random stranger in a crowd will suddenly “go postal...