Next month Alaska Sisters in Crime’s monthly meeting will feature journalist Sheila Toomey, she of the Lucious Lobe, aka the Alaska Ear, as guest speaker. No one who remembers her column on the closing of the downtown Alaska Bush Company will want to miss out on hearing her talk about her years covering the courts for the Anchorage Daily News. She’s one tough, smart cookie, and she can be funny as hell. For more information, go to the Alaska Sisters in Crime website and join up so you’ll receive the newsletter, which will tell you where and when you can see all the group’s great speakers. They’ve got a new social network, too.

In the meantime, more ‘maniacs with Stabenow books, beginning with Sandy in Boston with Hunter’s Moon in front of the USS Constitution (I’ve just been reading about it in David McCullough’s John Adams, a truly wonderful book I just reviewed on Amazon) and with Play With Fire in front of the Old North Church. Now, as Sandy well knows, I’ve long wanted to stand on the tower of the Old North Church and recite “One if by land, two if by sea/And I on the opposite shore will be/Ready to ride and spread the alarm/To every Middlesex Village and farm/For the countryfolk to up and to arm.” That would be Longfellow writing about Paul Revere’s ride. For an extra point, who was Sybil Ludington?

Here also is Thom Eley with a copy of So Sure of Death in Quantico, possibly in front of a [very] small stealth bomber because you know how those spooks are. And you also know Kate trained in Quantico, so she probably stood in that very spot at one time…