The meeting went well. It was good to see the Regis campus (beautiful) and to meet people. I met with one of the systems people, Joyce, and then I met with Shawna, who taught a summer intensive last year and had some great advice. We had lunch at a little Italian place and I had spaghetti. Gary gave me a couple hours to do some brainstorming on the class I'm going to teach which was helpful. I'm excited, a little scared, but this is the step toward my future. Gotta do it. I also have to do some things in order to get to the teaching part: I need one more class so I can officially graduate, I need to write one paper in order to get one grade up from a previous class, and I'll have to attend two weeks of training sometime in the Spring.
So...more things to add to my list of things to do along with Billings Film Society, the website, the workbook, etc.
So today I've been doing the weekend chores and got Tug walked. Steve was doing some scrapping and stuff but is home now.
I read a book while I was waiting in airports and flying and in the hotel room. ALL THE PRETTY GIRLS by JT Ellison. This is a book I got at LLC-Denver after I saw on a panel I attended. The author is very smart and snappy.
The reviews are mixed:
The body of a young girl discovered by the side of a Nashville highway puts homicide detective Taylor Jackson and her lowdown boyfriend, FBI Agent John Baldwin, on the trail of the Southern Strangler, a playful, brutal killer who likes to carry his victims across state lines before murdering them and removing their hands. Before long, however, Taylor's reassigned to the suspicious death of a prominent TV personality, leaving John struggling to keep ahead of the Strangler's mounting body count. Meanwhile, Taylor is still recovering from a near-fatal neck injury earned in her last case and worrying over her own demons—not the least of which is John's threat to marry her. The real victim is Ellison's plot, strangled by slow pacing, egregious subplots (a serial rapist, a crooked officer, a pregnancy scare) and a clichéd cast of characters: the shady Southern belle, the veteran detective pushed over the edge, the evil genius who stays a step ahead of everyone—even the appealing Taylor strikes a numbingly familiar tough-yet-vulnerable pose.
"With this debut thriller, Ellison puts her mentoring by Lee Child to good use. Ellison does a nice job of laying the groundwork and creating suspense. Equally well done are the refreshingly realistic procedural details." Library Journal
"Ellison does a skillful job of capturing the city and its flavors, while taking the police procedural out of its usual New York/Los Angeles/Chicago big-city milieu and placing it in a mid-sized, vibrant Southern city. She's populated her novel with believable players, on both sides of the law." BookPage
"Ellison’s debut novel is relentlessly paced and intricately plotted – and it features a villain who will have readers looking over the shoulders, even in the daylight." (4 Stars) Romantic Times
"Ellison paints a disturbing picture of a deranged serial killer, and the atmosphere of the book is taut, tense and suspenseful. The author's other forte is characterization . . . TV reporter Whitney Connolly leaps off the page, as does her twin sister, Belle Meade socialite Quinn Buckley. Even the murdered girls are quite vivid in the short time the reader has with them. Realistic descriptions of Nashville landmarks . . . add to the pleasure of reading this book. For the erudite, poetry snippets offer clues from the savage killer. The best part of All the Pretty Girls, though, is it's breathless pace." The Tennessean
For me, it was okay but there were plot elements including the kitchen sink that shouldn't have been there. I will read her next one, 14, down the road. She actually has a third one due out in January it looks like. Her website can be found at : http://www.jtellison.com/. She shares blogging duties at http://www.murderati.typepad.com/. It was enjoyable enough to keep me interested the last couple days.
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