Even a hard-bitten reporter needs help occasionally, and this time it’s the kind of help only a cat can provide.
The story is from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s collection, Five Feline Fancies, which is available in print and electronic editions. The story itself is also available as a stand alone ebook.
Our podcast to tide you through July is an Edgar Award finalist and one of the top ten stories of the year in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine:
Patricia Taylor’s spinning class instructor hates her: maybe because of the extra eighty pounds she carries on her frame or maybe because of the way she struggles while everyone else in the class does just fine.
But when her instructor ends up dead, Patricia must deal with her feelings for him and for everyone else in her small coastal town–including the killer.
It’s from Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s collection, Five Female Sleuths, which is available in print and electronic editions. The story itself is also available as a stand alone ebook.
What do you get when you combine:
* maps
* a serial killer
* a blonde
* more maps
* jokers
Blond, card-playing serial killers?
Blond jokers trying to find serial killers?
A serial killer who needs a map to find a blonde?
I give up.
One of the (many) cool things about Fiction River is the sheer variety found within the pages. Case in point, this week’s story, “Jokers,” by M. Elizabeth Castle.
It’s a crime story, natch, because it’s from Fiction River Special Edition: Crime, but it’s also about maps and a serial killer and a blonde.
So where do the jokers fit in?
You’ll have to listen to find out. If you’re like me, this particular kind of joker will be something you’ve never heard of before, and a cool thing. But then, it’s Fiction River we’re talking about, so it goes with the territory.
This podcast is no longer available. To hear the current podcast, please click here.
You can read “Jokers” by M. Elizabeth Castle in Fiction River Special Edition: Crime, which is available in ebook, trade paperback and audiobook at your favorite retailer.
Not a fib or a delicate shading of the truth, but a full-blown, send-you-to-brimstone-if-such-a-thing-ever-escaped your-sweet-lips kind of lie?
Yeah, don’t answer that one. It’s safer that way.
But keep it in mind while you listen to “Jury Duty” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. It’s our story podcast this week, and it’s from her collection, Five Female Sleuths.
A story about lies and the truths that are sometimes trickier than falsehoods.
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
“Jury Duty is included in the collection, Five Female Sleuths, available in ebook and trade paperback, and can also be found as a stand alone story in ebook format at your favorite retailer.
Do you have a full moon story?
Something strange and inexplicable that happened under one of those illuminated moons? Mine involves my mother.
At the time, she was a resident in a nursing home and required full care due to dementia. It had been at least three years since she’d been able to feed herself, say an intelligible word or recognize friends and family.
Yet, for the space of two hours under a beautiful full moon, all of her faculties returned. She could tell the difference between inside and outside, knew that a television was a device that displayed transmitted images (and not a window into another reality populated by very small humans).
She was back to her old self for the space of about two hours before bed.
The next morning, she was gone again.
Her board-certified neurologist had no explanation, other than saying her stroke-damaged brain was like a bombed-out city, and possibly had found new communication routes.
Maybe.
What I do know is that, thanks to a couple of hours of full moon beams, I got to say goodbye.
That zone where scientists speculate is fertile territory for science fiction writers. Happily, Marcelle Dube went there with her story, “The Verdant Gene.” In it she explores the mysteries of a planet with not one, but two moons and what happens at perigee. It’s from Fiction River: Moonscapes.
This podcast is no longer available. To listen to the current podcast, please click here.
You can read “The Verdant Gene” by Marcelle Dube in Fiction River: Moonscapes, which is available in ebook and trade paperback at your favorite retailer.
Of course, it was rarely a time when you wanted them to forget you were there.
I’m talking about the occasions when you overhead them talking about things they’d never, ever say if they knew you were listening.
There’s something universal about that experience that rings true in whichever decade you were the kid with the big ears.
That’s something Karen Fonville writes about in this week’s story podcast, “Rationing.” It’s from Fiction River Special Edition: Crime.
This podcast is no longer available. To hear the current podcast, please click here.
You can read “Rationing” by Karen Fonville in Fiction River Special Edition: Crime, which is available in ebook and trade paperback at your favorite retailer.