Best critical/biographical went to my friend Leslie Klinger for his brilliant New Annotated Sherlock Holmes.Best Paperback Original, The Confession by Domenic Stansberry.Best First Mystery by an American Author (the committee I spent last year chairing and reading for) was Don Lee’s Country of Origin.And the Best Novel Edgar for the year 2004 went to California…

Rain was predicted Tuesday, and it was a lovely day. Clearing was predicted Wednesday, and the sky opened. Life as usual. Wednesday morning I enjoyed the coffee room at the Library Hotel for a leisurely breakfast and perusal of the newspapers–although the tables there are really not big enough for the New York Times, they…

Greetings, fellow earthlings! I was wondering for a while if I existed still, because nothing happened when I tried to log onto my server’s web site to fetch email, and a plaintive request to look at the Laurie R King web site gave me similar results, or lack thereof. But Blogger seems to be working,…

I will be in New York this week for the Edgars, and I will try, really I will, to write a blog-a-day. However, if I go silent the entire week, worry not, it will just mean that there was a technological glitch and I will return when I’m back in front of my Mac. The…

I’e2’80’99ve been on an Ian McEwan binge recently, after reading SATURDAY (sorry, it seems I am not permitted to underline or italicize in this program, so you’ll just have to let me shout the titles at you. Complain to Google, they run Blogspot….) and loving it so much it added it to my very short…

So, as I said in the last post, faced with the choice of security or a very dicey route home through the hills, I chose the latter. If you’e2’80’99ve read A Grave Talent, you’e2’80’99ll have had a taste of what our storms do to the hills. And in fact, my friend Laura Crum used that…

The storms seem to have stopped here for the time being, which means the central California coast is flowering in that brief period between the rain season and the fog season. Those of us on hills can do a survey (cautiously’e2’80’94the poison oak is out) to see if there are any ominous stretch marks in…

The Roman Catholics this week are choosing a pope, to replace the one who traveled the world talking to people. Perhaps this time they might do well to choose a man who travels the world listening to people. If there is any meaning at all in the Christian message (and because you are sure to…

My friend Ayelet Waldman recently started writing a bimonthly column for the e-magazine Salon.com, opening with a chilling description of how her now-defunct blog (still up at Bad Mother) became a means of communicating suicidal thoughts. I have no wish to comment on that here, aside from noting that the very idea of being so…

There are now so many segments on the evening news that I can’e2’80’99t bear to watch, I might as well just stay in the kitchen and see to whatever is on the stove. The magazines and newspapers are no better: I close Time with half the articles unread, I turn briskly past the Smithsonian article…