What do the following have in common: An upgraded Nancy Drew, Santana, a black and white cat, and a clarinet player named Vic Ratto. I’ll give you a few minutes to think about it.
Did you figure it out? No? OK, this eclectic cast of characters has influenced, or is the product of, Jeff Bowman’s vivid imagination.
Things were as they had been for a long time. Nothing much changed. Relationships were well defined. Alliances were set. Positions were clear. Lines were drawn in indelible ink. It was comfortable.
No one likes the food police, especially during the Christmas holiday season. Retired Logland High School teacher Louella Belle Simpson didn’t care, though, as she never hesitated to criticize everyone’s eating habits, health status, or weight. Not even children were saved from being a target of the former health and home-ec teacher, which helps to explain why very few residents in Logland, Illinois, mourned her death. It was the manner of her demise that rocks the town, though, as poor Bully Pulpit Diner co-owner Marti Kerkoff found Louella in the spin cycle of the Logland Laundromat dryer.
Sarah Booth Delaney and her PI partner Tinkie live and work in Sunflower County, Mississippi. Tinkie’s married; Sarah Booth is still single although involved with Coleman, the sheriff. Sarah Booth also has her own personal ghost, Jitty, who pushes, prods, goads, and nags about Sarah Booth’s need to provide a Delaney heir.
Today at the Fresno High Flea Market, local Fresno author and community staff writer for KRL, Laura Sidsworth, will be selling and signing her two recently published children’s picture books. For the first five children to visit her booth, she will present them with a free, hard-backed, signed edition of either Spoiled Pink or The Treehouse Treasury.
Thirty years after Agatha Christie’s death, her grandson, Mathew Prichard, was cleaning out one of his mother’s rooms shortly after she had passed away. In a cardboard box he found his grandmother’s dictation machine-an obsolete “Grundig Memorette” reel-to-reel.
