Further reading:

A couple more Bill Crider mysteries.

Susan Witting Albert's Bleeding Hearts - latest in her series about herb shop owner China Bayles, in suburban/exurban Texas. OK, but I could see each plot turn coming a mile away.

The Untied States of America by Juan Enriquez - some interesting ideas, and some scary thoughts, but easily the winner of "Most Annoying Mush of Fonts/Typefaces of the Decade" award. Every sentence is its own paragraph, each a different type size, alignment to the left, right or center rather determined at random, it seems. Like a person whose voice is too emotional, who alternates shouting and arm-waving and hissing, the style distracts from the content. Which is fragmented, but contains enough facts to back up Enriquez's contention that we would be stupid to make any bets on whether the US flag is going to have more, or less, than 50 stars 50 years from now, or even 10 years from now.

And then, to get back to something well-written and well worth reading, the John McPhee I mentioned a couple days back. I had read several chapters of this book when they appeared as articles in The New Yorker, but they were worth re-reading. John McPhee can make anything sound interesting, including driving a chemical-carrying tanker truck across the country. Talking about how much weight trucks can carry:

The more axles you add, the more you can legally carry. In 1979, westbound at Rawlins, Wyoming, Ainsworth, in a reefer hauling pork, came up behind a "LONG LOAD OVERSIZE LOAD" surrounded by pilot cars, a press car, a spare tractor, a tire truck, mechanics, and bears. A lowboy, it had eighteen axles and a hundred and twenty-eight tires. From Argonne National Laboratory, southwest of Chicago, to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Palo Alto, California, it was carrying a super-conducting magnet that weighed a hundred and seven tons. At close to half a million pounds gross, this was the largest legal load ever to move in the United States, a record that has since been eclipsed.

And then, next chapter, he's at a pilot training school - ships' pilots, that is. And we get this:

The word "lapin" is not to be uttered on a French ship, remarks Yvon Satre, of Compagnie Generale Maritime, who is captain of the Pascal, which, like the full-size Normandie, shuffles containers between southern Europe and the Far East. Rabbits were carried as food on old French wooden ships, and - sometimes with disastrous results - they chewed not only the rigging but also the ships' wooden structures. You do not say "lapin" for fear of very bad luck, Yvon tells us. You might mention a small, flexible-bodied lagomorph with very long ears, but you never say "lapin".