Sunday Sundries, 50

1. AOTW. In the drive-thru at McDonald's. Stow. A bit of a line. In front of us, an impatient AOTW in a 4x4. When he gets to the pick-up window, he barks: "Did you have to go through the whole store to find me a Coke?" Then flips off the workers and roars away. 

2. Finished Sue Grafton's W Is for Wasted (2013) in her alphabet series about PI Kinsey Millhone. This one involves a homeless man who dies, leaving Kinsey with some very surprising news. The quality of these books has remained high (the first I read was G Is for Gumshoe, and I've been reading them ever since; X, I read, has already got a pub date), and most of the violence is offstage. (This one features an angry surgeon with a scalpel v. Kinsey.) Much of her novels concerns her relationships with neighbors, lovers (old and new), family. And they are set in the 1980s--pre-cell phones, PC's, etc.

3. Also finished Craig Johnson's 2nd Longmire novel, Kindness Goes Unpunished (2007), which I didn't really care for. It's kind of a duck-out-of-water tale. Sheriff Walt Longmire (from Wyo.--present-day) goes to Philadelphia to help his daughter, and I just never got too interested in it. I've started the third one and am relieved to see he's back in Wyo. Loved the TV series; the novels are quite a bit different.

4. Also finished Richard Price's very fine police novel The Whites (2015), the story of a NYC detective who is discovering that something is going on with his colleagues--something that bothers him profoundly. But what to do? Price is a darling of other mystery/thriller writers, and I really enjoy his work, too. He wrote some of the episodes of The Wire and some other excellent novels. Many praise him for his dialogue, but pretty much everything else is first-rate, too.

5. Monday evening--a grim post-dinner duty: A drain in our basement had backed up. 'Nuff said. Ah, old houses! Ah, home ownership!

6. A wonderful Mother's Day with our son, daughter-in-law, and grandsons. I'll think I'll do a full post about it later. So ... suffer as you wait ...