I was disappointed by the second volume of the companion to the Netflix series "The Crown" (much like season 3...ugh). The first volume was lovely: beautiful full color photographs and clear descriptions of each episode of season 1 and which parts of the story were myth and which were real. This volume, which covered seasons 2 and 3, felt very rushed and haphazard. Hardly any photos, and most were black and white. The recaps of each episode weren't nearly as concise as in the first volume, either.
I checked Georgie Blalock's "The Other Windsor Girl" out on a whim, and was pleasantly surprised with how much I enjoyed it. The book starts in 1949 with Vera Strathmore, dreaming of writing "real" fiction one day instead of the romance novels she churns out under the pen name of Lavish. Vera's fiance died in the war, and she's saving her money to go to New York and leave drab, decaying Britain behind. Her cousin introduces her to Princess Margaret one evening, and the Princess takes a liking to the unconventional Vera, who quickly becomes one of her "set". Vera is caught up in the whirlwind that is Princess Margaret: drinking and dancing all hours of the night, meeting all the best people. When the Queen asks Vera to be Margaret's second lady in waiting, Vera has a tough decision to make. It will mean giving up her own hopes and dreams to be available for Margaret 24/7. It was a fun book, a quick read, and despite some questionable slang (at one point Margaret uses the word "crap", which just struck me as absurd, especially in the 1950s) it was entertaining.
Sigh. So I happened upon Dexter reruns on Showtime the other day, and started rewatching them. Which led to me picking up the first Dexter book, "Darkly Dreaming Dexter", and rereading it. Despite the fact that I have a million library books checked out with due dates, and a million more books I own that I haven't read yet. Oh well. I know better than to fight it.
We meet Dexter, a serial killer who works as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami Homicide department. His foster sister, Deb, is a cop who is looking to make detective. When a series of hookers are murdered and drained of their blood, Deb begs Dexter for help catching the killer. The show dubbed him the Ice Truck Killer and had poor Deb actually date and get engaged to him, but in the book he's just Brian, Dexter's homicidal older brother. On the show Dexter killed him to save Deb, but in the book he let him run to show up and pester Dexter another day.
And then, once again ignoring all the library books, I reread the second Dexter book (I checked the third one out this morning from the library, since I only own the first two, so clearly we can see where this is headed...). Dexter accidentally becomes engaged to Rita. Doakes is following him night and day, making it very difficult for Dexter to cut people up. There is a killer on the loose who is cutting appendages off of people but leaving them alive and basically insane from the torture. Kyle shows up from Washington to handle the situation, and tells Dexter the killer's name is Dr. Danco, and he was involved with some shady stuff back in the day. So was Doakes. Deb and Kyle start a relationship, and then Dr. Danko kidnaps Kyle, so Deb turns to trusty Dexter to save him from a terrible fate.
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