Happy Friday, all!

After a whirlwind couple of weeks on the road for The Author’s Guide to Murder I’m finally back at my computer– and I promise to share a tour round-up here soon!  It’s been a marvelous blur of bagpipers, plaid, prosecco, and haggis hors d’oeuvres.  Thank you so much to everyone who joined us at an event, bought a copy, or requested it at your library.

Thanks to brilliant bookseller Karyl at Charter Books in Newport (seriously, thank you, Karyl!!!), I’ve been binge-reading Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax books and they were just exactly what I needed right now.  Isn’t it funny how sometimes you find a book at the wrong time and then it pops up again ages later just when you need it?  (Or when an extremely intuitive bookseller with marvelous taste recommends it to you?)  Decades ago, I picked up a copy of the first Mrs. Pollifax book at a school book fair and bounced off it.  Hard.  Twelve year old me demanded that my heroines be ingenues: it was all Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt and Elsie Lee and a romance to go with the suspense.

Now?  Now I absolutely adore the idea of an unlikely spy in her 60s.  Mrs. Pollifax, garden club member and pusher of the library book cart who volunteers herself to the CIA on a whim, is the pluckiest of plucky amateurs.  She’s a Mary Stewart heroine as empty nester.  She’s Joyce from the Thursday Murder Club books if Joyce also had to be Elizabeth.  She’s my new hero and I’ve blazoned my way through The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, The Amazing Mrs. Pollifax, The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax, A Palm for Mrs. Pollifax, and right now I’m very happily on safari with Mrs. Pollifax in Mrs. Pollifax in Safari.  Given that there are fourteen books in the series, I suspect I shall be traveling with Mrs. Pollifax for quite some time– or at least until I run out of Pollifax books!

What have you been reading this week?