Maggie Pill Mysteries

If this were a typical day, I might have called my sister and talked about nothing for a half hour. She knew I love my husband, so I could gripe for a while about his foibles and she wouldn't judge. She was patient with my stories, which tend to weave a bunch of asides in as I struggle toward the main point. She shared my negative optimism about life: It isn't perfect, but it's what we've got. Instead of calling, I might have driven the 30 miles to her house so we could go out to lunch. Or we might have sat on her porch, sipped tea, and relived our childhood. Those things were typical, but they're impossible now, since my sister died suddenly at sixty-three. There are positives here. She often said she didn't want to linger into old age, and we agreed that a quick death is better than a slow decline. (Hence the deer suit in the Sleuth Sisters stories.) We'd been out together the day she died, and her last words to me were how much fun it was, doing n...

It isn't that literary fiction is bad. I would never argue with the Great Minds who hand out Pulitzer Prizes and such. It's just that books that are termed "literary" aren't always what I'm in the mood for. Here's why. Too often, nothing happens. The author is so busy telling the character's thoughts and describing the sunlight on the pines that he/she forgets to put in, um, what shall we call them?  Events that lead somewhere.  When I got to the end of Papertowns , for example, I thought..."So what?" Sometimes something happens, but it's bad. And then it gets worse. I read The Gold Finch . I read All the Light We Cannot See . I even read Anna Karenina. Things happened. Things got worse. And then it was over. The characters are so messed up that I can't find anyone to like. Holden Caulfield. Raskolnikov. Anything I've read by Elmore Leonard. The author seems to have a feeling of god-like superiority to the characters: ...