Oops! I was hung over today, so I decided to read a mystery.
This is a quite original concept — it’s about a bunch of people in line for days for a huge sale, and the “mystery” bit is about whether the people in the queue have other motives for sleeping on the sidewalk than just getting a good deal.
As usual with Babson, it’s pretty well written on a page by page basis, but she needed, like, more more. You can tell that it was a struggle even to fill the 170 pages of this book, and she starts repeating herself around the two thirds mark.
Still, it’s a perfectly pleasant way to spend a day when your brain’s not working well.
I was actually trying to find a different Babson book — the first of the Trixie Dolan & Evangeline Sinclair series, which I know I have here somewhere. But I just couldn’t find it. So I thought I’d just re-buy it as an ebook, but nope! Not available. I guess neither her publisher(s) not her heirs (I think she’s dead?) are confident that anybody would want to read these old and not exactly celebrated books these days, so even if scanning, OCR-ing and proffreading a book wouldn’t be very expensive, it’s not worth it?
Anyway, The Internet Archive has that book, but as a scanned PDF. You can only “borrow” it, but there’s a plugin to allow you to download things anyway, and:
But… eh. Epaper contrast is already pretty sucky, but here we get almost-black on quite grey. I mean, I could fix that up (threshold everything over #aaa to #fff), but the resolution on this thing still wouldn’t make that particularly pleasant.
And I just couldn’t be bothered, especially since I was just trying to find something to read while feeling sorry for myself today.
Line Up For Murder (1980) by Marian Babson (buy used, 3.55 on Goodreads)
