Month: February 2011

I got hooked on Deanna Raybourn’s book Dark Road to Darjeeling in Puerto Vallarta. The novel follows the adventures of Lady Julia Grey and her husband, private inquiry agent Nicholas Brisbane, as they try to solve a murder in the tea-growing region of India in, well, in Darjeeling.

For fans of the British mystery, this has it all. A fabulous cast of eccentric ex-pats — a stiff- upper lip, aristocratic spinster devoted to maintaining the standards of the realm, a dotty minister and his bohemian wife who scandalizes the local society, a strange recluse who dabbles in the occult, two English sisters who’ve suddenly appeared and have rented a rose-covered cottage—the emblem of all things English—but who may not be as innocent as they appear, men whose inheritances may be in jeopardy, and no shortage of others, all of whom may have cause to commit murder.

And of course, there is the intrepid Lady Julia and . . .

Set in San Francisco in the late Thirties, City of Dragons PI Miranda Corbie witnesses the murder of a young Japanese man in Chinatown during the Rice Bowl Festival. The police want to shove the murder under the rug, but Miranda — for reasons of her own — pursues the case. You can practically feel the cold fog rolling in under the Golden Gate Bridge in this novel, hear the mournful fog horns, and feel yourself being jostled by the crowds in Chinatown with the strange sounds of Mandarin and Cantonese all around you. Miranda is a tough-talking broad, chain-smoking and bourbon-drinking. She gives Sam Spade a run for his money.

City of Dragons carried me back to a time in my life in the early Seventies when I lived on the top floor of a Basque Hotel in North Beach. The cable car clanged under my windows, and I had a view of the San Francisco Bay.

The rooms on that floor were all filled with women who wanted TO WRITE; typewriters clicked contstantly behind closed . . .

I’ve got the swimsuit packed, the pareo, the hat, the sandals, the sunscreen. Also, I’m throwing in a super expensive bottle of La Mer Body lotion I picked up at the Duty Free Shops at SFO on the last trip, and three bottles of Jo Malone scent— my own personal combo— Pomegranate Noir, Amber Lavender, and 154. Okay, so I do have a couple of nice outfits for dining at Trio and Café des Artistes, and a couple of Capri pants and tee-shirts for the more serious shopping expeditions. But mostly, I intend to slather myself with various . . .

The whole story broke when I was in Mexico. As we all know by now, I’m an insomniac, so when I woke up at two or so in the morning in a room not unlike the one my character Lili in Palace of the Blue Butterfly would also wake up in, I grabbed my I Pad and clicked on the New York Times. Well, not first thing. First, I lay there listening to the sounds of the city around me, feeling the winter cold in the high-ceilinged 19th century building. After I was pretty sure I’d gotten the setting right in my book, after I’d sort of . . .