Seances and Spiritualism

I was walking down the street this morning, taking my daily four-mile walk up and down Alameda ridge, listening to Kat Richardson's Poltergeist. I'm enjoying the book, the second in her Greywalker paranormal fiction series set in Seattle.

I bought the first book for our daughter at the Pacific Northwest Writers Association Conference in 2007, a pivotal year in my fiction future, as that was the year I also bought Richelle Mead's Succubus Blues (which led me to the Vampire Academy series), and when the Barnes and Noble women running the writers' showcase (where I'd been sitting with my stack), practically thrust sticky notes with the Twilight books' titles written on them, telling me my daughter would love them and they did, too.

I didn't start raiding my daughter's shelves until later that summer, but once started, I couldn't stop. So many authors, so little time. And new series and sequels arriving all the time. I love it. It was natural when Ed Goldberg, awesome guy, movie reviewer with KBOO and award-winning Portland mystery author who also writes under "Alan Gold", mentioned Kat Richardson, that I would look her up on Audible and download the next in the series.

And will the next, next, and next shortly.

What stopped me in my downhill tracks today was a sequence in which the main character, Harper, is talking about methods of faking psychic phenomena during a seance with her friend Ben. As I listened, other books that mention this kind of fakery came to mind, one in particular, and when Harper says she'd read about it in some book--she says she can't remember the name--after Ben mentions a character faking a spirit via a metal box strapped to her inner thigh, I thought: Ah ha! Miss Climpson!

I'd been thinking of that very book, Strong Poison. I think I'd like Kat Richardson. Her main character has a ferret named Chaos. Mine was named Fatima. And if she references Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers, one of my all-time favorite mysteries, she's gotta be a cool lady (her bio indicates that she writes for role-playing games, too, so she is definitely cool in that fantasy-geek kind of way as well as in the supernatural fiction writer dishing up vampires, witches, ghosts and things that go bump in the night way).

I'm not done yet. I have many miles to go before I reach the end, but I can't wait. With an author who references so many historical facts about seances and psychic phenomenon, one of my many supernatural fascination, I know I'm going to love the rest.