The Nature of Things

Journey to Munich by Jacqueline Winspear My rating: 4 of 5 stars With Journey to Munich , the twelfth and most recent in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs series, we've now spent more than twenty years in the company of this character; from the years just before the beginning of World War I to 1938, the time of this novel. We've followed Maisie from a child whose mother had just died and whose father gave her into domestic service with an aristocratic family, through her fortunate years and her education with that family, to the trenches of France as a nurse in the Great War, and afterward as she set up her business as a private investigator and psychologist. We saw her marry the son of the family with whom she had been in domestic service and then lose him in an airplane crash in Canada and, on the same day, lose the child she was carrying. In the last book, we saw her on her way home after those terrible events, stopping off in Gibraltar and getting involved in the Span...

Payment In Blood by Elizabeth  George My rating: 4 of 5 stars I recently read the first book in this series, A Great Deliverance , and decided to push on with the second one because I was curious to see how the characters developed. The two main characters, Inspector Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, are opposites in many ways - Lynley, the wealthy aristocrat, and Havers, the working class woman who has had to struggle for everything she has and who has a chip on her shoulder for the privileged aristocracy. One thing they share is a commitment to the truth and to solving crime. They are an interesting contrast. I empathize a great deal with Havers's situation, but I can tolerate Lynley, too, and I enjoy the interaction and the grudging respect that have been forged between the two. This time, the two detectives are dispatched to Scotland to investigate a murder, even though New Scotland Yard really has no legal standing there. The reason for the assignment becomes clea...

Almost summer and most of the blooms in my zone 9a garden are just as hot as the weather. Pride of Barbados ( Caesalpinia Pulcherrima ). Cosmos. Zinnia. More zinnias. Still more zinnias. And, yes, still more zinnias. Oleander. Wax begonia, a staple of the summer garden that can stand up to our heat and humidity. Crape myrtle, of course. And sunflowers. The groundcover wedelia. Yellow cestrum. A mid-season daylily. And another. What would summer be without summer phlox? And cannas. Tropical jatropha. Cashmere Bouquet ( Clerodendrum bungei ). Cypress vine. Chrysanthemum??? Yes, chrysanthemum! Turk's cap. The inconspicuous blossom of the beautyberry. It's the actual berries of the plant that put on the show later. And speaking of inconspicuous, maybe this doesn't really look like a bloom but it is. It's inland sea oats. The weird little blossom of porterweed. Most of the roses are resting now, but 'Caldwell Pink' blooms on. 'Mystic Spires' salvia. The sweet...

Remember this security advisory system from the Department of Homeland Security, the one that ranges all the way from green (lowest risk) to red (highest risk)? Well, did you know that you can go to the website, www.personalthreatlevel.com ,   and create   your own personal threat level chart? Here's one that reflects the state of a blogger's psyche.  There have been times that I've been at every level on this chart. Right now, I'd score myself as blue/guarded, but there are days when I could easily shoot right on up to red! How about you? How's your personal threat level colored these days? ( Hat tip to TYWKIWDBI for the idea.)

So, here we are again. Another day, another massacre.   Once again, we see cynical politicians offering their "thoughts and prayers" for the victims of another mass shooting, often on Twitter . With one hand they send their sorrowful tweets and the other they hold out for their payoffs from the NRA for offering nothing but thoughts and prayers . No action. No sensible gun control. No universal background checks. No banning of assault weapons. They won't do anything to upset their masters. Thus, Congress, the only entity that might be able to stop or at least inhibit these periodic massacres of our fellow citizens, refuses to act, except to offer thoughts and prayers and moments of silence . And, thus, the massacres will continue. Tomorrow, next week, next month, there will be another one, and we'll be outraged and sad for a few days and then we'll just move on, accepting that there is nothing we can do to stop these events. Poll after poll show that a majority of ...

We've had a spring filled with eventful weather here, and now as we soon head into summer and the heart of hurricane season, we may be forgiven for being a bit anxious about what that season will bring. Billy Collins, one of my favorite contemporary poets, has given some thought to weather and its history and, of course, he has written a poem about it.    A History of Weather   by Billy Collins It is the kind of spring morning – candid sunlight elucidating the air, a flower-ruffling breeze – that makes me want to begin a history of weather, a ten-page volume elegy for the atmospheres of the past, the envelopes that have moved around the moving globe. It will open by examining the cirrus clouds that are now sweeping over this house into the next state, and every chapter will step backwards in time to illustrate the rain that fell on battlefields and the winds that attended beheadings, coronations. The snow flurries of Victorian London will be surveyed along with the gales ...

Echo Park by Michael Connelly My rating: 4 of 5 stars Time for another Bosch fix for my reading addiction. Echo Park is number 12 in the Michael Connelly's popular series, and it is up to his usual standards. We are in 2006 and, as we learned in the last book, Bosch has given up on retirement and returned to LAPD to work cold cases in the Open/Unsolved Unit. He's once again teamed with one of his former partners, Kiz Rider. The truth is Bosch never stopped working cold cases, even during his brief retirement. There are certain cases from his past that he was unable to clear and that haunt him still. One of those is the Marie Gesto case. The young woman disappeared in 1993. Bosch and his then partner, Jerry Edgar, worked the case but were never able to make an arrest, even though Bosch had a guy in his sights that he felt was probably the perpetrator. No trace of Marie was ever found, but Bosch is sure she is dead. He has kept in touch with her parents all the years since thei...