Caught Dead in Wyoming - Sign Off by Patricia McLinn 


It has been a long time, looks like five years, since I've written anything for this blog  The intervening time has been spent recovering from a long time working (slept for a year) and then gradually piecing together a life of retirement.  I went back to work though not with the ferocity that I had worked before but something to do for part of the day crunching numbers.

And, I've been reading.  Lots and lots of reading.  I discovered Kindle and get many of the book I read from Kindle's special deals most every day.  These are books that I am able to read for free!  And, "Sign Off" from the Caught Dead in Wyoming series by Patricia Mclinn is a book I recently found to read.  Check out webberbooks.com to get on their mailing list and receive Amazon's Kindle Free and Reduced price books yourself.  You can get to the link on Amazon to download "Sign Off" for free (at least as of April 13, 2019) here.

What drew me back to the blogging board after having been gone for so long is my complete lack of organization.  I wanted to remember this series and this author so I could go back and find other books by Patricia McLinn to read.  It turns out that I am now also forgetful as hell and having this blog is a terrific way to remember the books I read and go back when I feel like reading the same one or another by the same author.

What's so special about "Sign Off"?  It was gripping.  I was hooked from the beginning and you can't always say that with every free book you get from Amazon.  EM Danniher is a big city television reporter who is banished to the wilds of Wyoming after a particularly distasteful divorce.  Her ex did the banishing, the cad.  So, she has landed in the small town of Sherman, Wyoming where things are ever so different from life in the big city.  Murder makes its way into the picture.  A little girl asks her for help and the story is on.  Also, best of all there are more books in the series.  This one is the first one, always nice to start there, but there are seven more to read and no telling how many more Patricia has written. 




I like how Patricia McLinn writes.  She's got a rhythm and freshness that caught and held my attention.  Her characters are genuine.  I'd gravitate to them if I met them on the street.  Thanks to Patricia McLinn I was moved to do my first book review in five years. 

"The Ocean at the End of the Lane" by Neil Gaiman

It doesn’t matter that it has been four years since I last made an entry to this blog.  What matters is that I am writing today. 

To explain my absence to anyone who is wondering I will only say that I didn’t die and yet, in a way, I did.  I got sad.  I got angry.  I despaired.  It took me a long time to come to the realization that I didn’t have to go with the flow any longer; that I could make a decision about the direction I wanted to go. 

So, lately I’ve been caught between my old life (still in my old job) and the future (which I’m still hazy about). 

This morning I was thinking about how reading a whole boatload of books years ago by Stephen King were instrumental in jump starting my psychic part of life.  I always wondered how that was possible.  Obviously, it doesn’t happen to other people who read his books.  There are just too many of them. 

But this morning I thought that perhaps the way he writes, the way he snatches at thoughts speaks to my inner being in such a way as to amplify and bring a confused and muddled self into a place where things are a bit more understandable.  A place where I can perhaps not exactly identify them but close enough to where I can hold the focus of my attention long enough that I can get a better look at them.

A week or so ago I was surfing around on the internet and came upon an article where somebody had wonderful things to say about Neil Gaiman.  It was like someone had thrown a line into the lake with a sparkling, spinning fishing lure on it and I bit.  I went online to our Oakland public library and reserved one of his books.  A few days later I got an email announcing that it had arrived at our local branch.  At my first opportunity I checked it out and began reading, “The Ocean at the End of the Lane”. 

It is a quick book to read, slender and lightweight.  I couldn’t put it down.  Please read it, not just for the story but for the way this man, like Stephen King, can reawaken memories of childhood.  The magic of being a child that, as an adult, you think is long gone, that in reality is really with you for the rest of your life.

I am practicing trusting in the universe.  I am open to the idea that what we need comes to us.  I am open to the idea that our vibrations attract similar vibrations.  The vibrational writing of Neil Gaiman is something I think I need near me right now.

I think "The Ocean at the End of the Lane" is a book of transformation.

“The King of Lies” by John Hart

“The King of Lies” by John Hart

Wow. I tore through this book at top speed. I just couldn’t (well, I didn’t want to) put it down.

This is a story of a lawyer and what happens when his whole world goes bottom up. The story tugs at your own heart because even though it is a work of fiction it is also a story anybody can relate to.

All of us are comfortable in our own lives. Our reality has been a certain way for a very long time. We’re used to it. We can walk in the door and not have to face up to old issues that we either don’t want to look at or have forgotten completely.  Granted, we grow throughout our lives, but hopefully, it is just one small step at a time and you don't experience more than a mild jolt.  It is the big steps we have to take that can be most uncomfortable to make.  This is a big step.

It’s an eye opener. It’s like what happened to me when I read, “A Course in Miracles”. Beyond being a riveting story it makes you ask yourself if you are really being true to your own heart or have you been compromising your own truth for years. This book reminds you of what it is like to ask yourself a hard question and take the next step in growing spiritually.

I’m going to seek out more of John Hart’s work. The reading of this particular book began as a nudge from my own Spirit Guides. On my way to work about a week ago they urged me to hang a right on Fruitvale and swing past the library to have a look at the orphan books that had piled up over the weekend in front of the library’s doors. I picked up this book and several others. Books from writers I’ve never read before. Some fresh books and thanks to Spirit for the tip.

“U is for Undertow” by Sue Grafton

“U is for Undertow” by Sue Grafton. Imagine, A through U. That’s 21 novels Sue Grafton has written.

Kinsey Millhone is a gutsy private eye. It takes me back to when I was a little girl and read the Nancy Drew mysteries. Nancy was my hero, or I suppose heroine. Kinsey is the same. I really admire how she moves through life. I’ve seen her fall in love and out of love in the different books I’ve read. She isn’t an aluminum plated super-hero. She’s as normal and as warped as any of us is, but still, she’s got a courageousness that I admire. I haven’t read them all; just the ones that come my way. And, it really doesn’t matter if you hopscotch all over the alphabet to read her stories.

In this one an emotionally troubled young man has a flashback to when he was 6 years old and brings a case to Kinsey. He can only afford to pay her $500 for one day’s work. He’s read an account of an unsolved kidnapping that happened years before. Every year the town’s newspaper runs an article about how Mary Claire vanished and was never heard from again. When Michael Sutton reads the news article his troubled memory flashes on two men digging a hole. They told the little 6 year old boy they were pirates and were digging for treasure. Michael believed them then, but when he revisits that old memory he realizes it was around that time that Mary Claire disappeared.

And, so the story goes. You can get a good feel for how Kinsey takes all sorts of facts and finally puts the pieces together to make a plausible story.

Sue Grafton’s Alphabet novels aren’t just about the cases Kinsey Millhone takes on. They are about Kinsey too so that as you read more and more of them you get to know Kinsey, the character, in a way that makes her as memorable and as real as she must be to Sue Grafton.

I’m a writer, but I was a reader first and I always felt a sense of sadness as I waved goodbye to the characters I’d come to love in whatever book I was reading at the time. There was this sense of regret that I would never meet them again, so when I am able to latch onto a writer who can’t say goodbye to their people either my heart does a little happy dance and I curl up again with a good book.

Every Last One by Anna Quindlen

It has been awhile since I did a review. It’s not that I stopped reading because I have not. It’s because my reading changed for a time. Instead of devouring them and then taking the few moments it would take to write a review I began to read books like a chain smoker. No pausing from one to the other.


People have things happen in their lives that jolt them, that somehow make them jump their tracks. That happened to us. Our long time neighbor of 20 years Phil passed away in January. Here it is six months later and I’m still off kilter. I realize that he is okay. I’m a psychic and a channel in my alter life and so am able to speak to him any time I want. So, I realize he has another life and is content and happy, but still I grieved. That grief took me away from much of what I was doing at the time. I have several blogs and several websites and lots of things to do that interest me not to mention a forty hour a week job.

I slipped into a rut that consisted of work and reading. Slowly I am taking small steps to move on. Now, I will try one other thing, a review. Why? Because I read a book that mesmerized me for a time.

In, “Every Last One” Anna Quindlen fleshes out her characters so well that you can almost finish their sentences for them you get to know them that well. Personally I think that is a very difficult thing probably because I have yet to do it myself with the passing attempts I make at writing. But, for me reading is a joy and I learn from each and every book I read (or re-read). I think I might have glimpsed some of her writer’s magic in this book.

From a writer’s standpoint I am in awe. From a reader’s standpoint I couldn’t put it down and from a person who is grieving I could feel hope.

This story shows what happens to a person who is happy with her life. Granted things might be a little different or better, but whose life is like that anyway? Perfect. No, this is about a real person’s life. The mother, the wife, the friend and how she is to each of those people who spin out from her center. But, there at the center of her universe it is safe. Each day flows one into the next. People change and there are regrets. But, really, it is just one day after another, one season after another and one year after another.

Until something so horrifying happens that cannot ever have been foretold. And, the last part of the story is how Mary Beth Latham learns that there can be life after a devastating moment.

I’m recommending it to any who would like to read it.

The Outlander Series

Like I don’t have enough to do. I started reading the Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon again. I’ve made it though the first 3 books and today have embarked upon the fourth one.

1. The Outlander – Where Claire steps into a stone circle in 1945 and emerges 200 years earlier. Where to save her live she marries Jaime a Highlander and where they fall in love.
2. Dragonfly in Amber – Where Claire and Jaime make their way into the turmoil that resulted in the slaughter at Culloden trying their hardest to subvert the efforts of Bonny Prince Charles to no avail. And, where Claire, pregnant goes back through the stones to her first husband Frank.
3. Voyager – Where her husband Frank has died and Claire is ready to tell her daughter, Brianna who her real father is and where her roots lie. Where with the help of an historian, Roger, Claire and Brianna find out that Jaime never died at Culloden, but survived and was noted in historical documents. And, where Claire goes back through the stones to find him.
4. Drums of Autumn – I’ve just started this one. I know what’s coming up. I’ve read these books several times. They average about 1,000 pages each.
5. The Fiery Cross
6. A Breath of Snow and Ashes
7. An Echo in the Bone

I just today found out that the 7th book, An Echo in the Bone, was published last October, 2009. And, rumor has it there will be an 8th book before the saga is over.

If you love historical romance. If you love time travel. If you love a swash buckling yarn that goes on and on and never seems to stop you will want to read these books.

“Survivor in Death” by JD Robb (Nora Roberts)

“Survivor in Death” by JD Robb (Nora Roberts)
2005, GP Putnam’s Sons
ISBN: 0-399-15208-3

Sometimes you are just in the mood for hard, fast and thrilling. That’s what I can always count on when I pick up a book where Nora Roberts is writing as JD Robb.

A family is murdered in their beds. One was missed. Nixie is the daughter and she had invited her best friend in the world, Linnie, over for a sleep over. But, Nixie wanted an orange fizzy and Linnie didn’t want to get up. Nixie went by herself to the kitchen and that was when her world changed forevermore.

Murder was done to all the members of her family and to her best friend. Gone. Blood everywhere. Done in minutes. But, they didn’t see her. They weren’t looking for her. They took out the father, the mother, the housekeeper, the son and the daughter. Except the daughter was hiding, covered with her mother’s blood and instead her best friend had been murdered in her place.

Detective Eve Dallas takes the case and is sworn to both protect Nixie until the murderers are apprehended and find her a place to be in the world. Somehow it all got very personal as memories of the damage done to this family and to this small survivor of madness reminds both Dallas and her husband Roarke of the injustice they also experienced as children.

You get to see yet another side of Dallas, the people on the New York Police Force she works with and a tantalizing glimpse into the near future combined with tough crime fighting that will have you on the edge of your seat.