I just finished a great book called Triggerfish Twist, by Tim Dorsey. It's darkly funny, warped and twisted, with a hilarious mesh of intertwining subplots. Some of the same crew from Florida Roadkill, another very funny novel that I bought based on title alone, and was not disappointed. Although the well-mannered, intellectual history buff (oh, and incidentally, psycho serial killer) Serge will always come first in my affections, I was quite taken with Triggerfish's Ambrose Tarrington III, a former millionaire, now a retired and lonely septuagenarian. He spends his days (and finds companionship) by roaming Tampa test-driving luxury cars and touring on-the-market mansions, none of which he can afford. People let Ambrose take all sorts of liberties and totally kiss his butt because they see huge commissions looming, which of course never materialize. Because everyone believes Ambrose to be not just rich, but dirty rotten filthy stinking rich, nobody ever dares to call him on it. I really admire his panache. I want to be like Ambrose when I get old. If I get old, which I probably will because only the good die young...

After I finished "Triggerfish", I started another novel; this one is called A Cold Heart, written by Jonathan Kellerman. I'm only about 40 pages into it so there's not much to say other than so far, so good - interesting murder mystery. The author's name sounded really familiar to me, so I thought I'd probably read other books by him but I recognized none of the titles listed inside A Cold Heart. Maybe I'll figure it out if a familiar character pops up.

Incidentally, I dislike it that when I put something in italics that, by rights, needs italicizing, such as a book title, it winds up looking like a typo with no space between the italics and the next word. I tried putting two and three spaces in but when it published, it came out looking just the same. You also cannot see on the published version the period at the end of the penultimate sentence in the paragraph above, which is quite roundly and blackly there in the edit window. So, for the record, I CAN type.

One final item courtesy of Cheryl: click here to get your Goth name. Hers is Liquid Vamp and mine is Bloody Tears. All my fangbanger friends can just call me "B.T." for short.