Status Updates From Understudy for Death (Hard ...

Looking like a 3 star rating if I get around to finishing. I probably should have read a book from Willeford's Hoke Mosely series first but I have a backlog of Hard Case Crime books I'd like to read.

I'd killed a fly on the window once with a can of hair spray, and didn't realize it until the fly turned a lacquered black, with overtones of gold....

I had other spies as well; a cute blonde secretary in the Chamber of Commerce office who hated the manager; an embittered court reporter who was forced to take down the minutes of the City Commission meetings; and every single member of the hotel and motel association. They furnished me with names and activities of their important and unimportant guests alike. And a name printed is a paper sold.

"Listen, Mr. Hudson," Mrs. Chatham leaned forward and wet her full lips. "If all the young girls in the United States studied ballet there wouldn't be any nuns. Ballet makes a woman conscious of her body, and reminds her that it's useful."

"That's an interesting theory."

"Not a theory; plain fact. I studied ballet myself as a girl and I know what I'm talking about."

"Newspaper readers are a morbid lot, Mrs. Chatham; they enjoy reading about death in every form. We report knifings, matricides, patricides, infanticides and suicides, and the obituary column is the most popular feature on the paper. On state-sanctioned electric chair murders we send a personal representative, and we describe all highway deaths as colorfully as possible."

After the car pulled out of the driveway, I dropped the Venetian blinds in the living room and switched on the television set. I was going to have to make up a sex schedule of some kind--only ten days had gone by, but suppose I had let the whole month pass by? My shoulder was still sore, and burning under the bandaid. But in a way, I was grateful for the way things that worked out.

A well-to-do Lake Springs matron, Mrs. Marion C. Huneker, 30, after leaving a farewell note addressed to her husband, Mr. Jack L. Huneker, 36, president of the local Huneker Concrete Block & Ornamental Iron Co., fatally shot her two small children and herself last night.

Slow off the mark and travelling along at a snails pace. Sex scenes aside, there’s not a lot of ‘action’ to this point.