It's hard to write for another author's characters and setting; the more interesting they are, the more this is so. The comparatively colorless Nancy Drew or Bobbsey Twins don't lose much by being handed over to whatever author the Edward Stratmeyer organization had available, while even as a child I found that any attempt at Oz books by writers other than L. Frank Baum were unreadable.

Sherlock Holmes has for a centurty been popular enough for other authors to try and write him, and eccentric enough that most have failed to capture his essence. Nicholas Meyer's The Seven Per Cent Solution was once the only novel-length story that I felt stood up to the work Sir Arthur Conan Doyle dashed off to support his more serious writing. Meyer's Holmes and Watson differed from the original, but it was explained why -- the consequences of increasing use of the cocaine that Holmes had indeed taken occasionally in Conan Doyle's stories.

My father, also a Holmes buff, a few years ago showed me The Beekeeper's Apprentice by Laurie King. He'd enjoyed the story of a retired Holmes entertaining himself training the mind of a fifteen-year-old girl living near him, once she'd shown herself worthwhile material for training. However, my father will not read the sequels that Laurie King has written featuring a Mary Russell who has grown older, because Holmes and Russell have married. For my dad, a married Holmes is just unacceptable. To me, though, it follows perfectly from the relationship they have in the first book -- hardly romantic, but a marriage of best friends and working partners. Conan Doyle's Holmes only ever respected one woman -- Irene Adler, who outwitted him. King's Holmes has found another mind he can respect carried in a female body, and their partnership is merely made formal (and more convenient, given the era) by a marriage certificate. Russell even keeps her maiden name.

The Beekeeper's Apprentice, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, A Letter of Mary, The Moor, O Jerusalem, and Justice Hall have been my reading material for the past week and a half, and I just started the latest in the series, The Game. Previous books in the series have been all over England with sea journeys to Palestine and Canada; this one heads towards an India still under British rule, thirty years after that of the frequently-referenced Kim by Rudyard Kipling (which I have yet to read, but will probably track down after this). So far I am enjoying this well-researched story as much as the previous ones. Like O Jerusalem, it takes place amongst the difficulties of international politics of the era (Holmes' older brother Mycroft, major figure behind the scenes of English government, appears more often in King's works than in those of most others who've tried their hand at Holmes) and the non-English cultures Holmes and Russell must disappear into.

Throughout the series, any differences from the Conan Doyle canon are explained -- there is no feeling of disregard for the original. I couldn't stop re-reading the first six of the series (hence the finishing them all in ten days) and I look forward to finishing the seventh.

Gorillas and autism. The two topics don't immediately seem to go to together. But then, most people have preconceived ideas about both: hostile King Kongs and children who can't be brought into human communication by any means. Dawn Prince-Hughes' book Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism dispels both stereotypes.

OK, so I'd read enough animal books to know that gorillas are not all that violent -- nothing compared to humans! And I was familiar with the idea that what most people think of as "autism" (specifically identified as Kanner's Syndrome) is just the far end of a spectrum with "normal" at its near end, with some of the middle areas identified by such names as "Asperger's Syndrome." That middle ground is "characterized by difficulties in processing stimuli, sensory oversensitivities, and challenges in social interaction." And who hasn't encountered those things some of the time? The author describes rituals from her childhood: "I also wanted to keep as many of my own accoutrements as possible the same. This meant that I did not want a new toothbrush, new clothes, new shoes. I continued to drink out of my favorite blue baby bottle until I was almost four, when it was replaced with a deep violet tumbler made of aluminum. I wanted to drink only root beer at that point . . ." I don't think this will sound particularly unusual to a lot of parents -- the concept of "security blankets" spread from the Peanuts comic strip because being attached to an object is common among kids -- and even adults; I'm reminded of the movie Pulp Fiction and its character Butch who risks his life to go back for a family heirloom, the watch owned by four generations. An incredible number of the traits the author describes from herself can be found in people who would never be considered, and many people who are eventually diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome are not diagnosed until adulthood. "Most high-functioning autistic people, not knowing what is "wrong" with them, develop a lifetime pattern of using their intelligence to appear normal," Prince-Hughes points out, and this reinforces the public image of what constitutes autism.

(However, some of the ways people cope with problems, be they neurological ones like this or any other kind, are not necessarily healthy in the long run. Drinking at a young age, dropping out of high school, and becoming homeless may have been the best ways available at the time for her, but one really wishes there had been other options.)

Price-Hughes' description of her earliest attempts at romantic and sexual relationships are particularly interesting because they bring up what everyone expects from first impressions of a person and how easy it is to mistake lust for love. The author compares herself to Seven of Nine from Star Trek: Voyager -- "I find that I am only part "human" and very much something altogether different; I am overwhelmed by the social demands of "normal life"; and I am lonely." Then a visit to the zoo leads to her great interest in watching the gorillas -- their own interactions, and how zoo visitors act toward them. "The gorillas don't speak human language, look the way humans look, move the way humans move. They are stupid. This is why gorillas are captive. This is why crazy people are captive.We are the animals who don't speak the language, look the looks, move in the right ways . . . It is easy for those who are not captive to forget that those who are remain individuals."

Price-Hughes' interest in the zoo gorillas led her first to read on her own and then to seek out academic programs that would let her learn about them and gorillas in general. This book details the individual gorillas at this zoo and tells about their behavior; I found this particularly interesting because all the other books I've read on apes have either involved observation of them in the wild, or in laboratory environments where they are not in family groups. This different setting allows for more detailed observation of their interactions and their individual differences -- the story of the different gorillas' tactics when given the Halloween jack-o'-lanterns on the first of November was fascinating: how this one went for the biggest pumpkins, those two for whichever were nearest, another seemed to test them to find the best quality in a similar way to grocery shoppers in the produce department, and still another chose the one with the nicest carving. And human similarity to our ape relatives actually helped Price-Hughes: "I tried to apply the things I'd learned from the gorillas in social situations. I tried to put people at ease by acknowledging them with quick sideways glances and smiles -- which evolved from submissive primate grimaces and are intended to convey that no harm is meant." And so on.

The gorillas became the author's friends to such a degree that when one called Congo died, she took some of his hair to Africa to bury, as Congo's body was going to be dissected and analyzed in the U.S. Price-Hughes was also able to continue a long personal relationship and continue academically through a Bachelor's, a Master's, and eventually a Doctorate degree. None of it was easy -- could it be for anyone? -- and only through researching a younger relative's condition did she find out a name for what might be her own condition. However, just having a name and a diagnosis to point to does sometimes help in dealing with other people, and sometimes also with one's own emotions.

Price-Hughes is a proud parent of a son, but she is still also connected to gorillas and other apes. The single most amazing thing in this book for me was her story of meeting Kanzi the bonobo (the species formerly known as pygmy chimpanzee):

"When I first met him, he asked me to play chase, and so we ran up and down along the fence, back and forth, him with a big bonobo smile and me slipping into my natural gorilla ways. Suddenly he stopped, grabbed the lexigram board containing the symbols he uses to communicate with, made a series of gestures, and then pointed to the lexigram board. I had to explain apologetically that I didn't understand what he was saying. Sue and I discovered that he had realized I was a "gorilla," had remembered seeing videos of Koko the signing gorilla, formulated the hypothesis that gorillas use signs to communicate, and then employed accurate ASL signs to ask, "You . . . gorilla . . . question?" No one, not even Sue, knew that he had retained signs from watching the Koko video. He had gone through all of these cognitive and emotional steps to try and bridge the communications gap between us."

Wow. It would be impressive for a human to pick up enough words of a foreign language from a (non-language-teaching) video to form a new question (not just parroting the same sentences already heard), not to mention the chain of thought. It isn't always easy for humans to realize consciously what it is that someone's physical mannerisms remind them of, either. Even if Kanzi is the Einstein of bonobos, his example shows us how much thought the furrier beings on this planet can be capable of, and justifies a lot more respect for apes and contemplation of the similarities between the human and the other higher primates. Price-Hughes' book will stretch your mind on these subjects.

I've read a lot of books about child abuse. (There's a stack of papers on the floor by my computer of reviews and comments that I need to add to my bibliography of children's and young adult books about abuse.) However, this is the first time I've read the story of a child abused through Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. I had actually heard of that particular mental disorder before, but then I have a brain full of all kinds of obscure things. "Munchausen's syndrome," named after the exaggerating Baron von Munchausen, is a disease where people fake illness or do things to make themselves sick, so that they will receive sympathy or care from others. "Munchausen's syndrome by proxy," or MBP, takes the deception one step further: a caretaker lies about the illness of someone dependent on them and may induce symptoms in the dependent person. The doctor who wrote the foreword to this book says that approximately 1,200 new cases of this are reported annually in the U.S., which seems like a lot if you look at it from the point of view of the people, mostly children, who suffer so that some adult in charge of them can get emotional satisfaction.

In Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood, Julie Gregory tells the story of growing up "fragile as a microwave soufflé," being forever tested for heart problems, migraines, food allergies, and anything else that her mother or whatever doctor is seeing her this month can think of. Being given medication that never cures anything, just makes her sicker than she was before. Being told, "I'm the mom: I know what's going on here. So if he asks you questions, you just let me answer" before doctor appointments, even though the elementary school girl already notices that "as she runs down the symptoms, I know some of them aren't all the way true." And when something is really wrong, her mother makes it worse: waiting hours to take her to have her broken wrist set (one during third grade, the other during fourth grade). Even a couple of incidents of misdiagnosis or parental error might befall any family. But Julie, and her younger brother, and even the foster children who arrive later, all seem oddly prone to all these different illnesses, and perhaps someone might have noticed this if it weren't for the secluded country house and the changes of doctors. (Or perhaps not; all the abuse stories I've read make me very sceptical about what people are willing to notice.) Her parents are hardly healthy in other ways either; her father makes her eat used tissues after she leaves them on the floor; her mother threatens suicide on multiple occasions.

Selections from Gregory's medical records throughout childhood are included in the book (doctors' names blacked out) and it's amazing how many can be summarized as "patient reports such-and-such symptom but we can't find anything wrong." Or perhaps it's not surprising at all; the parent is considered the authority, the one who knows when a child is acting cranky because they're tired and all those other not-obvious connections between outside and inside the offspring they're raising. If only all parents were really trustworthy interpreters.

Mom thinks I'm allergic to the new carpeting in our house, but Dr. Phillips puts me on an elimination diet to see if it's something I'm eating. He tells her to take chocolate, meat, eggs, dairy, and bread out of every meal I eat.

After our appointment, Mom and I amble down the aisles of the supermarket, my fingers looped through the metal slots of the cart as I watch what she pulls off the shelves: Oreo cookies, pork chops, Grade A eggs, two-percent milk, and a couple loaves of Wonder. Bay's Grocery doesn't seem to have any of the foods Dr. Phillips wants me to eat.

At sixteen, Julie is the one who discloses enough of what's happening to get the foster children taken away from her parents; she spends some time in foster care for her own safety ("And I wasn't sick anymore. The whole time I was in foster care, I didn't take any heart medications because they all got left behind when I ran away. Instead of seeing doctors, I spent my free hours jumping off the diving board and the public pool and shopping for clothes with my hospital [summer job] paycheck. It was going on six months since I'd seen a cardiologist...") but her parents go to court to get her back. "It was probably me, I told myself, just having a rough time adjusting to adolescence. Or, as Mom and the school counselor had decided in tenth grade, just an incredibly fertile imagination." Even once she's away from home, her upbringing hangs on: "The skinny and ravenous hospital girl of thirteen, the girl whose mother would not feed her, has given way to the skinny and ravenous girl of twenty-three, who cannot feed herself. [...] He [the doctor] doesn't ask me if I am eating. I don't know that I'm not. The way I care for myself is no different than the way Mom taught me to, following the doctor's advice."

Julie is in her mid-twenties and in a college psychology class before she ever hears of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. When she sees talk therapists, they are nearly as ignorant: "Most times I do not feel like a client, but an educator who pays to teach my therapist about MBP." But she identifies what has happened, faces her past and, unlike her brother and many others who were abused as kids, does not push all the bad times out of her mind. And she continues to take the brave steps of keeping children out of her mother's hands, when she finds out that her remarried mother has taken in children of her husband's relatives, putting up a web site, and eventually writing and publishing this book. I hope it spreads awareness of this condition and saves others from going through anything like her own experience.

Recently I picked up my big old omnibus volume of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series for relaxing reading while I was fighting a cold. I'm not all that picky about format (but I have had very little money for much of my life) so it's quite rare that I buy a hardcover version of something I already own in paperback. This series, Gone with the Wind, and Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass are the only ones I can think of where the paperbacks became so battered that I bothered to replace them with hardbound versions. For the Hitchhiker's books, the omnibus volume offers an author's introduction explaining why the books, the radio series, and the BBC television show have somewhat different plots, as well as an additional short story, but it's for the texts themselves that I acquired it.

Re-reading the Hitchhiker's books reminded me of how wonderful they are. Well, the first four. I read them out of order originally (second, first, fourth, third, I think) back in middle school, these stories of everyday Earthling Arthur Dent and his unwilling journey through time and space with Ford Prefect, an alien who got to know Arthur while stranded on Earth; Ford's two-headed, three-armed semi-cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox; Tricia "Trillian" McMillan, astrophysicist and mathematician who met Zaphod at a costume party in London. Douglas Adams was the master of digression, adding in random short chapters about planets entirely inhabited by pens or other gleefully ridiculous topics that somehow seem to explain a lot about how the universe works. Sometimes the digressions even ended up relating back to the main plot later, but that was a bonus. The fifth book, Mostly Harmless, doesn't live up to the others; it has its funny bits and if it hadn't followed such outstanding books it would probably rank above average, but compared to the first four it seems forced. However, I am thinking that my younger brother is about the age now that I was when I encountered the series, and perhaps I should buy him a copy of the first book and pass on the hilarity to a new generation.

I went on to read Adams' underappreciated Last Chance to See, a very different type of story because it's true. Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine journeyed around the world to visit the habitats of various endangered animals (many of which, like the kakapo and the baiji, you may never have heard of if you haven't read this). However, Adams' "ignorant non-zoologist" narration is very reminiscent of Arthur Dent's bewildered Earthman at times. The book has its humor, but not like the Hitchhiker's books; it may be easy to laugh at the idea of ill-tempered aliens blowing up the Earth and all its creatures to make a hyperspace bypass, but not so when real-life humans drive the Yangtze river dolphin (baiji) to near-extinction through pollution and boat accidents. Adams was justifiably proud of this book for increasing awareness of the situation of many beings on this planet among readers who might not have picked up a book on wildlife otherwise.

And after I finish that, I'll probably pick up Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, going back to the humor but in a more convoluted way than the Hitchhiker's books. Because reading some Douglas Adams always makes me sorry when it's over.

Khassan Baiev is a man with all the bravery his Chechen ancestors could have wanted. Yet amazingly, growing up among the stories of Russian and later Soviet attempts to subjugate the Chechens, including his own parents' deportation to Kazakhstan after World War II, and encountering prejudice during sports competitions and medical training in different parts of the Soviet Union, did not seem to have left him bitter. He returned to Chechnya from a Moscow practice when the likelihood of a Chechen-Russian war became apparent, and rather than taking his own family and fleeing as so many did (and they can hardly be blamed for it!) he stayed in Chechnya, first in the capital city of Grozny and then in his hometown of Alkhan Kala, to provide medical care -- and not just for the Chechen wounded, either; he treated Russians, soldiers and civilians, despite risk to himself from Chechens who considered this traitorous. As he says at one point, "Speaking to the Russian doctor felt perfectly normal, yet there was something strange about it because we were supposed to be on opposing sides. However, we were really both on the side of the wounded." Though with years of fighting destroying his homeland, it is understandable that "there were times . . . when I was tempted to exchange my scalpel for a gun," Baiev stuck to his resolve to try and protect life, even though "sometimes I felt as though I was the little Dutch boy with his hand in the dyke, only I was holding back blood."

Even when peace had been declared, medical work did not stop -- disease was rampant, both from germs and from stress. Baiev speaks of his own depression amongst the ruins, and it is certainly an example of what many, many others are going through in Chechnya and other war-torn regions once there is time to think of more than daily survival. Baiev's Islamic faith, and the opportunity to visit Mecca as Muslims are supposed to do at least once in their lives, provided a lift to his mental state. (And his mentions of the differences between Chechen and Saudi Muslim practices may help Westerners remember that Islam is no more an undivided movement than Christianity.)

After fighting started again, Baiev had several narrow escapes from both Chechen and Russian fighters who felt he was serving the other side and deserved execution. Eventually he was forced to leave Chechnya and serve his country differently by telling the story of events there. (His nephew Adam had worked for some time videotaping events in Chechnya and getting the tapes out to the rest of the world, and was killed because of it.) Baiev says speaking out to foreigners allowed him to feel "I was doing something useful to Chechnya." Eventually his family was able to join him in the United States, and he chronicles the difficulty of starting over in a new place, going from being a skilled surgeon to someone who doesn't speak the language or have the certifications to be allowed to practice medicine, adapting to a new culture, and recovering from the trauma of war. His work with Ruth and Nicholas Daniloff on this book, The Oath: A Surgeon Under Fire, serves as an overview of Chechen culture and its survival despite Russian control, a window into a war many Americans couldn't find on a map, and what a single determined human can achieve in the midst of the worst carnage.

Wow. I kept saying that thoughout Melvin Konner's Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews. There was just so much in here I'd never heard about!

My mom brought me up Catholic (in Columbia, South Carolina, where an acquaintance once asked what religion I was and upon hearing "Catholic" responded "Well, I'm a Christian." So I have some clue about being a religious minority.) My father's mother took me to Methodist Sunday school and Baptist Vacation Bible School when I visited. So I'm fairly well-grounded in the Old Testament, but as I recorded in my 9th grade diary, ("Mr. Brown had Noah tell us about a little of Jewish history. Mostly stuff I already knew but thought of as Christian history. Weird.") I wasn't likely to think about it from a different point of view. Becoming an agnostic made me a little more interested in other people's views, and I've always been interested in cultural history and anthropology. (My beloved jokes that I'll read anything with "social history" in the title.) So I picked this off the New Books shelf at the library, thinking of it no differently than if it were a book on England or Russia or China.

But I haven't really read much on a group that has had a minority status which persisted throughout millennia and settlement around the world. I'm not sure any other group has such a status. I don't usually read books about religion, but the author tells us in the introduction how he lost his Jewish faith and identity as a teen but re-entered American Jewish culture when his children were born, a confession that assured I would not think he was trying to spread the word of God as so many Christian works are prone to do. He covered the history of the Jewish people as told in the Torah/Old Testament, and where it was or was not corroborated (and indeed was sometimes contradicted) by other sources, and then the saga of the Roman-empire era and reasons for Jewish dispersion from their homeland. This was interesting and covered details I would probably not find in general histories, but the discussion of the Diaspora and the cultures made of Jewish people living among others was the truly new part for me.

A person on Amazon has a review of this book that complains,"The most notable omission is the lack of discussion of Jewish experience outside the Middle East except for Spain, North Africa, Ethiopia, China, and Cochin." Frankly, since I knew little about the Spanish and North African Jewish communities and nothing about the others, those discussions were fascinating for me. The United States has a Jewish culture largely drawn from the Ashkenazic Jews of Germany and Eastern Europe; finding out about the other Jewish people and cultures of this world was the new part to me, and no doubt to most American readers who knew of Jewish history largely from reading general European history. Also, there is an emphasis on Jews in the New World before the larger emigrations from Europe in the late 1800s which I have never seen in a general history book; it makes me proud of my country's founders to know that George Washington, in response to a letter from the congregation of a synagogue in Newport praising his equal treatment of Jews, wrote back:

"All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the government of the United States, which gives bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection shall demean themselves as good citizens."

One wishes his views were followed by his countrymen, then and even now.

And then, of course, modern history gives us the most shameful episode in European history, the Shoah, the Holocaust. (Not that such genocides haven't been tried in other times and places, but rarely have circumstances and technology combined to give them such an immense body count.) My maternal grandmother says her maternal grandmother (my great-great-grandmother) was Jewish. If she and her Catholic husband hadn't come to America from Germany in 1883 with their children, my great-grandmother would have been in her fifties at the time when Hitler came to power, and such "half-Jews" were sent to the concentration camps as readily as those whose parents were both Jewish. Quite likely, if she had wanted to flee, by that time she would have been trapped by restrictions on Jewish immigrations that the U.S. and many other countries had enacted by the 1930s. In addition to the usual chilling stories of what happened in ghettos and concentration camps, Konner discusses the Jewish resistance, who sometimes even had to deal with anti-Semitism from non-Jewish resistance movements, and the saboteurs within the camps who managed to stage revolts that made at least two of the death camps unusable. I was also interested (and disgusted) to find that Jewish "displaced persons" after the war were under Allied policy to be sent back to their homes before the war, even if their entire towns had been destroyed by anti-Semitic locals, and that it was necessary for many who wanted to go to Israel to get there illegally.

And then there's the history Zionism and the birth of Israel, which I had read about in other sources but still had never heard some of these details (such as the British suggestion that Jews be given Uganda in Africa as a homeland). Konner does not ignore the situation of the Palestinians who were there during the decades when Jewish immigration increased and when the state of Israel was made official, though he does point out the contradictions in the policies of many of the surrounding Arab states in refusing to accept Palestinian refugees (essentially condemning them to living in refugee camps. These camps' existence perhaps helped to maintain anti-Israeli feeling in the Arab countries, but it does seem that it made the rejecting countries no better than the one the refugees left.) The book also covers the interesting relationship of Israel and American Jews, who in some ways rely on Israel for part of their Jewish identity, and the situation of semi-assimilation and a decreasing Jewish population in the U.S. because of intermarriage and people who drift away from the culture they were brought up in. His wonders about the future for Jewish people in various places are thought-provoking, whether or not they affect you personally or just as a part of humanity.

I don't read nearly as much fiction as I used to, now that I have access to libraries with non-fiction that isn't so astoundingly dated as the libraries around me in high school. But when I went on my holiday trips recently, I went through the paperback fiction shelves to find some books to bring on my travels that didn't weigh so much as hardbacks. And I found both good and bad. The stuff I didn't expect to like, I didn't pick up, of course -- the romance novels, the science-fiction movie/TV tie-ins, the techno-thrillers that my boyfriend once described as "like reading VCR manuals with dialogue." But it's not always that easy to judge. There were some really lousy mystery novels with covers that looked good enough to check out, so I didn't find out how bad they were until I was sitting in at an airport gate debating if killing time with a story this dumb was really worth it. However, I found two books I enjoyed enough that I was pleased to find both were the starts of series, and once I got home I promptly went and checked out all the books the library had from both of them. One series was traditional mystery, and the other a harder genre to label.

There are a lot of novels that might be summarized as "wacky Florida crime stories." Usually I have trouble getting into those, partially because the Miami world where most of them take place isn't very much like Tampa, where I like. An acquaintance on Everything2.com described Tampa and Jacksonville as "very much like normal U.S. cities" -- not something you can really say about the Miami or Orlando areas, or those Panhandle areas that are Florida's North but the American South. So one of the things that grabbed me about Tim Dorsey's Florida Roadkill was the fact that a lot of it took place in Tampa. (This was no surprise once I read the "About the Author" blurb, as he lived here and used to work for the Tampa Tribune.) But even for those who don't live here, this terribly funny story of several competing groups chasing around Florida after a suitcase with 5 million dollars cash in it, as well as each other, draws you in. Some of the characters are relatively normal and others are really messed-up, but some of the weirder people are easier to sympathize with than the ones you might expect to find living in any old neighborhood. On reading Hammerhead Ranch Motel, Orange Crush, Triggerfish Twist and The Stingray Shuffle, I realized that the first book hadn't really given me any clue as to which of the many characters from the first book would show up in the rest of the series; I was actually surprised as to who became the "main character" (though never the only focus of the action). Technically, Florida Roadkill, Hammerhead Ranch Motel, and The Stingray Shuffle are the ones that actually continue the same plotline about the suitcase of money; the other two are digressions featuring the same main character at a different time of life. (I haven't read the latest of Dorsey's, Cadillac Beach, because as I write it hasn't actually been released.) But all of them were crammed full of sentences and paragraphs that I just had to read aloud to whoever was within earshot because they were so amazingly hilarious to me, and it never got old the way some humor writing can get after five whole books by the same author in the same setting.

The other series I discovered starts with The Strange Files of Fremont Jones, a mystery set in 1900s San Francisco and featuring a young lady from Boston striking out on her own as a typist, across the country from the stepmother who wants to marry her off. I had also picked up one several books later in the series (it was all that was on the shelf) at the same time, Beacon Street Mourning. The Strange Files had its weak points, but not enough of them to keep me from reading the other book, and it was that one, where Caroline Fremont Jones has become an experienced private detective, which really made me go and check out the rest. It wasn't just the references in Beacon Street Mourning to events that had taken place in the intervening books, but author Dianne Day had developed the character far better in the later book. (And certainly the events mentioned in passing sounded like things that would mature a person quickly!) I haven't yet actually read the remaining books yet (Fire and Fog, The Bohemian Murders, Emperor Norton's Ghost, Death Train to Boston) but the stories that bracketed them were enough to recommend the series to me, and I think I can recommend them to others. I'm quite disappointed to find in the Amazon reviews of Beacon Street Mourning that "Doubleday no longer intends to publish series mysteries, and because of this, Fremont Jones has met an untimely end. And because of contractual matters, Day can't take the series to another publisher. So, enjoy this one, folks -- it's the last in the series. It's a real shame!" However, Day is still writing other works and I may have to pick those up.