Diane and I have watched THE MARLOW MURDER CLUB on PBS. The first two Seasons introduced the three women characters: Judith Potts, a retired archaeologist, sets crosswords for the local newspaper. Suzie Harris is a professional dog walker, while Becks Starling, a former music industry executive, is struggling to adapt to her new life as the vicar’s wife. Together, the three women are able to solve murders that baffle the Police. If you’re in the mood for a cozy mysteries series, this is it!

The Marlow Murder Club is a British-American cosy mystery comedy-drama television series based on Robert Thorogood‘s series of novels set in the English town of Marlow, Buckinghamshire. GRADE: Incomplete, but trending towards a B+

Series 3 (2026)

Series 3 consists of three stories, each split into two 45-minute episodes in both the UK and the US.

Tim Sullivan and his DS George Cross series of mysteries are emerging from the Land of Forgotten to the Land of Increasing Popularity. Could a TV series happen in the Future? I hope so!

I’ve reviewed several of Tim Sullivan’s mysteries here and here. The Bookseller (2025) and The Tailor (2026) are the seventh and eighth books in the George Cross series.

It’s not often that a bookseller or a tailor get murdered, but Tim Sullivan loves to pick unusual victims of puzzling crimes for George Cross. Cross is an autistic police detective who has remarkable investigative abilities. He solves crimes that stump other, more experienced, police detectives because of his unique perspective on clues.

In The Bookseller,  DS Cross delves into the work of bookselling and the market for rare books to solve the murder. bookseller’s family, acquaintances, and enemies have a mix of motives. On top of the bookseller’s murder, Cross has to deal with the medical problems of his father. GRADE: B+

The Tailor presents a different plot from the previous George Cross mysteries. A tailor is brutally murdered in the toilet aboard a passenger train. His luggage is missing. Cross and his new partner, investigate a baffling crime what takes some international aspects. In addition, Cross has to address new problems with his ailing father. GRADE: A-

Tim Sullivan’s DS George Cross are currently my favorite mystery series. You should give these delightful book a try!

DS Cross Mysteries:

1 The Dentist (2020)
2 The Cyclist (2020)
3 The Patient (2022)
4 The Politician (2022)
5 The Monk (2023)
6 The Teacher (2023)
7 The Bookseller (2025)
The Basket Case (2025)
8 The Tailor (2026)

TRACK LIST:

My sister Eileen fell in love with Patrick Swayze in 1987 when she saw Dirty Dancing. Then, I think Eileen saw Dirty Dancing over a dozen times that year. And, she also played the Dirty Dancing soundtrack a few hundred times.

The Ultimate Dirty Dancing soundtrack from 2003 includes all of the songs from the movie. It’s like a Greatest Hits of the Sixties CD. “Be My Baby” by The Rosettes, “Big Girls Don’t Cry” by The Four Seasons, “Do You Love Me” by The Contours, and “Stay” by Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs are just some of the classics from that era.

The song Eileen loved most from the Dirty Dancing soundtrack was “She’s Like the Wind” sung and co-written by Patrick Swayze. In the US, the song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart,  No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100  and No. 2 on Cashbox Top 100. Worldwide, it became a top-10 hit in nine other countries.

Do you remember Dirty Dancing? Do you remember these songs? Any favorites? GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

In his INTRODUCTION, Robert Silverberg writes about why he prefers to write Science Fiction in the novella format over short stories (he’s written over 400 of them) and novels (he’s written over a 100 of them).

These six novellas are presented in chronological order so you can see Silverberg’s development as a writer from the 1950s to the 1990s.

“The Valley Beyond Time” presents a group of humans and aliens kidnapped from across the Galaxy and held on an unknown planet by The Watcher. “How It Was When the Past Went Away” shows what happens when people lose their memories. “Going” follows a composer who is a hundred and thirty-six years old in a Future where population control encourages older people to “Go.”

The title story, “This is the Road” is a harrowing story of a small group of people trying to escape from an invading army. “Lion Time in Timbuctoo” concerns a Future set in an alternate history where the Black Death of 1348 devastates Europe, leaving Western civilization too weak to colonize Africa.

“In Another Country” is the best-known story in this collection. It was written as a “sequel” to C. L. Moore’s “Vintage Season” and published as TOR Double #18. Time travel is tricky…

If you’re a Robert Silverberg fan, you might already have all of these novellas in other collections. But, if you’re a reader who wants to explore the excellence of Robert Silverberg, This is the Road is the perfect book to do that. GRADE: B+

Laser-Focused Science Fiction (Foreword by John Shirley) — vii
Introduction by Robert Silverberg — ix
I. Valley Beyond Time (1957) — 1
II. How It Was When the Past Went Away (1969) — 41

III. Going (1971) — 99

IV. This is the Road (1973) — 147

V. Lion Time in Timbuctoo (1990) — 203

VI. In Another Country (1990) — 267

About the Author — 337

It’s 1987 and the Cold War is still…cold. Ryan Reynolds plays Lieutenant Troy Kelly (no relation), a Navy pilot whose spy plane is shot down over Russia…deep into Russia. Fortunately, Kelly is rescued by a former KGB agent called Nick (Kenneth Branagh) who admires America as much as he despises the KGB. Together, the two men make their way across the rugged Russian wildness with the KGB not far behind.

When Kelly is able to contact the Moscow Embassy, he’s told the U.S. Military can’t send a Rescue Team to save him because the spy plane was a secret. So Kelly and Nick are faced with getting out of Russia on their own.

I really liked Kennth Branagh’s performance as a Russian. He’s both earnest, funny, and extremely dangerous! Ryan Reynolds is his typical snarky self. Mayday is a combination of Buddy Movie and Chase Movie. I enjoyed it. GRADE: B+

If you read Joe Lampe’s funny book, The “S” Word, you will be smiling like he is! Pure silliness in 26 pages! GRADE: A

Desiderio’s Dinner Theater is one of our favorite local establishments. Over the years, we’ve seen some wonderful plays and enjoyed some wonderful food.

I had never heard of An Old-Fashioned Family Murder by Joe DiPietro but the actual play is both clever and funny. The Colonel, a wealthy but ill father, decides to change his Will. His two daughters, Clarice and Dotty Claythorne, discover one of them might be cut out of the Will.

Arthur Whittington, a once successful mystery writer, intends to begin writing his come-back novel in the Claythorne mansion on a dark and stormy night. Shirley Peck, the widow of a legendary police detective, has a knack for solving crimes. Her young son, a junior Detective Paul Peck of the local police force, struggles to find the clues to the murder and to make sense of them when he does.

An Old-Fashioned Family Murder is plenty of fun. It premiered on September 2024 at the New Theatre & Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas, featuring a cast that included Sally Struthers, Caitlin Kinnunen, and Kevin Ligon. The local cast, Justin Chortie, Jay Byron, John DellaConttrada, Lilian Reszel, Lisa Hinca, and Steven J. Brackmann, put on a good show that garnered plenty of applause at its conclusion. GRADE: B+

I read Mary Beard’s Talking Classics (2026) and Confronting Classics (2013). “One big question drives this book. What is the point of the ancient classics? To put it another way, why should we bother about. what people did 2,000 years ago or more…” (p. 1)

“Nor should we imagine that classics can hand us ready-made answers to contemporary problems on a grader scale, or neat comparisons with modern politics. The fall of the Roman Empire in the west (not likely to have been caused by anything as simple as mass immigrations or lead in the water pipes) does not help very much to examine the decline of modern empires…. The historian Tacitus, for example, seems almost to anticipate George Orwell in exposing how language itself is polluted by autocracy, how in a regime of dissembling and flattery words no long meant what they one did. But Tacitus doesn’t have a solution ready for us.” (p. 71-72)

Beard waffles around a bit while discussing “the Classics.” Are they still relevant? Can we discern the world and culture of 2000 years ago? I should have stopped here, but I went on to read Beard’s earlier book, Confronting the Classics.

I found reading Mary Beard’s Confronting the Classics a frustrating experience. Clearly, Beard is very knowledgeable, but she clearly doesn’t understand the Common Reader. For example, in “Which Thucydides Can You Trust?” Beard criticizes several translations of Thucydides. Far enough. Beard’s criticisms seem valid. But then Beard leaves the reader hanging. What is a good translation of Thucydides? Beard never says. The second frustration with Confronting the Classics is more of a marketing quibble. When I picked up Confronting the Classics I thought I was going to read about which classics should be read and how to read them most productively. Instead, the reader discovers Confronting the Classics is a collection of Mary Beard’s book reviews. True, the books she reviews all have something to do with the Classics. But reading over 30 book reviews, some of them fairly technical, isn’t what I thought this book would be when I started reading it. GRADE: B
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Introduction: Do Classics have a Future?

SECTION ONE: ANCIENT GREECE
1. Bulder of Ruins
2. Sappho Speaks
3. Which Thucydides Can You Trust?
4. Alexander: How Great?
5. What Made the Greeks Laugh?

SECTION TWO: HEROES & VILLAINS OF EARLY ROME
6. Who Wanted Remus Dead?
7. Hannibal at Bay
8. Quousque Tandem…?
9. Roman Art Thieves
10. Spinning Caesar’s Murder

SECTION THREE: IMPERIAL ROME–EMPERORS, EMPRESSES & ENEMIES
11. Looking for the Emperor
12. Cleopatra: The Myth
13. Married to the Empire
14. Caligula’s Satire
15. Nero’s Colosseum?
16. British Queen
17. Bit-part Emperors
18. Hadrian and his Villa

SECTION FOUR: ROME FROM THE BOTTOM UP
19. Ex-slaves and Snobbery
20. Fortune-telling, Bad Breath and Stress
21. Keeping the Armies out of Rome
22. Life and Death in Roman Britain
23. South Shields Aramaic

SECTION FIVE: ARTS & CULTURE; TOURISTS & SCHOLARS
24. Only Aeschylus Will Do?
25. Arms and the Man
26. Don’t Forget you Pith Helmet
27. Pompeii for the Tourists
28. The Golden Bough
29. Philosophy meets Archaeology
39. What Gets Left Out
31. Asterix and the Romans

Afterward: Reviewing Classics
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Sources
List of Figures
Index

TABLE OF CONTENTS (TALKING CLASSICS)

INTRODUCTION — 1

1. A Sense of Wonder — 13
2. How to Be Modern? –51
3. Rights and Wrongs — 91
4. The Case for Classics — 137
Epilogue: The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum — 171
Further Reading and Some Explanatory Notes — 175
Acknowledgements — 187
List of Illustrations — 189
Index — 193

I was in the mood to listen to some live performances from a couple of singers have admired over the years. Some critics consider Sinatra at the Sands one of his best performances. It’s surprising because this 1966 performance was Sinatra’s first live recording for Reprise Records.

In addition to the Count Basie Orchestra with Quincy Jones arranging and conducting, Sinatra delivers some of his best songs: “I’ve Got a Crush on You”, “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” ,“Street of Dreams”, “The Shadow of Your Smile”, “One For My Baby”, “Fly Me to the Moon”, and wrapping up the set with “My Kind of Town.”

Sinatra was at the top of his game on this album!

Lou Rawls Live at the Century Plaza was released in 1973. Some critics view this album as a progression of Rawls moving from his gritty 1960s Capitol Records style toward his smoother 1970s Philadelphia International sound. 

I enjoyed the dynamic covers of Beatles songs like “Something” and “Golden Slumbers,” along with a four-part blues medley, and electric versions of Rawls’ classic hits like “Love Is a Hurtin’ Thing”, “A Natural Man”, and “Tobacco Road”.

Both Sinatra at the Sands and Lou Rawls Live at the Century Plaza show Sinatra and Rawls at their best. Do you have a favorite Sinatra and/or Rawls song? GRADE: A (for both)

TRACK LIST: SINATRA AT THE SANDS

TRACK LIST: LOU RAWLS LIVE AT THE CENTURY PLAZA