Case of the Careless Kitten

I'm quite sure I read this Perry Mason mystery at some point during the last 20+ years, I just didn't remember it, and it was reissued, so I took the opportunity to read it again. Helen gets a call from someone who says he is her Uncle Franklin, who disappeared 10 years earlier. He asks her to go to Perry Mason. No sooner does Helen get off the phone when her kitten, Amber Eyes, goes into convulsions. Helen rushes the kitten off to the vet, who determines the little guy was poisoned. That was just the beginning of this caper, which saw Della arrested and on trial for witness tampering. It was a bit confusing, but I think I probably wasn't paying as good attention as I should have been, due to everything that's going on in my life.

Chaos; Outlander

My father passed away suddenly at the end of October. He wasn't a big reader, but he would call me up and ask what I was doing, and I'd tell him: "Reading" (almost always) and he'd say: "What are you reading?". He was always interested in whatever book I was reading, even if he didn't know much about the subject he always had something to say. I'm really going to miss that. He wasn't just my father, but my best friend. I'll miss you, Dad.

Suffice it to say, I haven't been reading much over the past few weeks, but I did manage to finish "Chaos" by Tom O'Neill, which was super interesting. He's been working on this book for over 20 years now. He never bought the official motive in the Manson murders ("Helter Skelter", trying to start a race war) and went looking more deeply into the case. I admit, the motive always seemed a little weird to me, as much as I enjoyed Vincent Bugliosi's book. O'Neill found pretty compelling evidence that links Manson and his followers to a top secret CIA mind control experiment involving LSD and hypnosis. It's hard to know what to believe at this point, but brainwashing and LSD make as much sense as anything else, I guess.

I started watching the Outlander TV series, and I read the first book about 7 or 8 years ago, but didn't remember much. I know I didn't get any further than part of the second book before life got in the way, but I did want to read them, so I went back and reread the first one. There were parts that were a little boring, but overall not too bad. Claire is a nurse in the 1940s, and she and her husband, Frank, travel to Scotland for a second honeymoon after being apart during the war. She falls through a wormhole in time and ends up in the 1740s and ends up getting dangerously involved in the Jacobite rebellion that ultimately ended up destroying the clans forever. She marries a Highlander named Jamie Fraser to protect herself from the English soldiers who think she's a spy.