Well kids … there was a time before the internet when friends used something called a telephone to keep in touch. Once in a while we’d write letters. It’s true.
Ron and Kate took the time to put together friendship newsletters called The Calgary Redeye. They collected contributions from friends and put it together on a photocopied, stapled publication.
Out in Saskatoon, I decided to launch a goofy competitor to the Redeye. I called it Lifebeat.
Here’s the Christmas 1991 edition. 😀 The goal was to make friends laugh.
… a year after getting shot on a job that took a dangerous turn for the worse, Jane McKinnon, née Whitefield, has settled into the quiet life of a suburban housewife in Amherst, New York — or so she thinks.
One morning as she comes back from a long run, Jane is met by an unusual sight: all eight clan mothers, the female leaders of the Seneca clans …
A childhood friend of Jane’s from the reservation, Jimmy, is wanted by the police for the murder of a local white man.
But instead of turning himself in, he’s fled, and no one knows where he is hiding out. …
Jane must find and hide him.
Actually, the end of the book was satisfying. A good wrap-up.
Freida McFadden (born May 1, 1980) is the pen name of an American thriller author and practicing physician specializing in brain injury.
Her 2022 book The Housemaid was an international bestseller.
In recent years I’ve begun to tire of the endless line-up of psychological thrillers. But this one is better than average.
Millie is a young woman with troubled past, having recently been fired from her job after an incident which nearly sent her back to prison.
She is unable to find work due to her criminal record and spends a month living in her car.
She jumps at an opportunity as a live-in maid for the Winchester wealthy family: Nina, her husband Andrew, and their daughter, Cecelia, who live in a luxurious estate on Long Island.
Their seemingly perfect life unravels when Millie discovers that the Winchester household hides dark secrets beneath the surface.
To me the twist was predictable.
The husband character one of the most absurdly unlikely I’ve ever read.
The ending of the book was satisfying. BUT I’m unlikely to read on in the series.
According to Stephen King, “there are probably only a half dozen suspense writers alive who can be depended upon to deliver high voltage shocks, vivid, sympathetic characters, and compelling narratives each time they publish. Thomas Perry is one of them.”
The Butcher’s Boy, features as its protagonist a professional hitman …
After dispatching an innocent union member and a U.S. Senator, he arrives in Las Vegas, Nevada to pick up his fee. Instead of a payoff he finds himself on the wrong end of a murder contract.
The Butcher’s Boy seeks to collect the debt by terrorizing the Mafia – the lifelong source of his freelance jobs and current nemesis – into backing off. …
A fascinating character.
The second story line follows Elizabeth Waring, a bright young, unmarried analyst in the Justice Department, who seems mostly incompetent in trying to catch up to the killer. Her role was unimportant to me — but she appears again in the sequel ➙ Sleeping Dogs.
The anti-hero contract killer has left the United States and is living in England, hopefully safe from America’s organized crime,which he decimated and alienated in the first book.
He is recognized quite by accident by a minor American crime figure while at the track in Brighton, and the mobster has the bad judgement to attempt to enhance his standing by counting coup. The results are predictable. …
The whole book is a tragicomedy of errors, with the Butcher’s Boy, the mob, and various law-enforcement agencies assuming motivations and intentions on the parts of the other players that are completely erroneous, and result in much quite unnecessary mayhem. …
Insatiable Appetites (2015) is another entertaining read in the series. Number 32. A bit more complicated than most.
Barrington Stone and his friends are at the White House to celebrate the election of pregnant (PARIS MATCH) Katherine Lee as the first female President of the United States …
Stone is stricken when his friend and mentor, Eduardo Bianchi, dies.
He was called to the old man’s bedside for some last-minute instructions on how to handle his awesome estate and to be told that one of the women in his life is really his daughter, Carla.
She is to be given an equal share of the inheritance his other offspring will receive. …
As the novel unfolds, Dolce, one of Eduardo’s daughters, is released from the nunnery she has been in for over three years due to her mental illness.
She is treated by a priest who is also a psychiatrist, and they have a long affair.
Suddenly the priest turns up mutilated. WHO is the killer?
But when he discovers the body of a mysterious woman floating in the waters of the Venetian Lagoon, he finds himself in a desperate race to recover a lost masterpiece by Leonardo da Vinci.
The painting, a portrait of a beautiful young girl, has been gathering dust in a storeroom at the Vatican Museums for more than a century, misattributed and hidden beneath a worthless picture by an unknown artist.
Because no one knows that the Leonardo is there, no one notices when it disappears one night during a suspicious power outage.
No one but the ruthless mobsters and moneymen behind the theft—and the mysterious woman whom Gabriel found in a watery grave in Venice. A woman without a name. A woman without a face.
The action moves at breakneck speed from the galleries and auction houses of London to an enclave of unimaginable wealth on the French Riveria—and, finally, to a shocking climax in St. Peter’s Square, where the life of a pope hangs in the balance.
Rick McCharles 