Since there isn’t much going on these days, other than sending out resumes and hoping for the best, I’ve been doing a lot of reading to keep myself entertained. A few months ago I picked up a book at the grocery store. It caught my eye because the author, Erica Spindler, has been a favorite of mine for quite some time now. It’s one of her newer books, Copy Cat, and I have to say I highly recommend it to just about everyone in the mood for not only a romantic story, but a suspense thriller as well. Paperback cost me about $7 but you can find it on Amazon for as little as $1.

The Sleeping Angel Killer provides the chilling focus to Spindler’s 12th bloodcurdling romantic thriller (after Killer Takes All). Kitt Lundgren and Mary Catherine “M.C.” Riggio of the Rockford, Ill., VCB (Violent Crimes Bureau) vow to catch a serial killer who sets the suffocated bodies of 10-year-old girls in their own beds, dressed like angels in frilly white nightgowns, hair spread out on their pillows and pink lip gloss applied postmortem to their mouths. Spindler’s setting of a “meat-and-potatoes” Midwest town provides a fresh background for two believable and very cool investigators. Kitt, a recovering middle-aged alcoholic, tried and failed to catch the murderer five years earlier, during a 2001 killing spree, while her own child was dying of leukemia and her marriage was falling apart under the strain. Now, when eerily similar crimes recur, someone calls Kitt, identifying himself as the original killer and the new perp as just a copycat. M.C., an ambitious, distrustful newbie, is assigned to help Kitt with the investigation. The detectives must overcome their personal problems in order to catch the monsters, a task culminating in a breathless finale.

I’m not done with the book yet, I only started reading it before I went to sleep last night. After about an hour I was 150 pages in and found it damn near impossible to put it down. The only reason I did was based on the lack of ability to keep my eyes open. While I was enjoying the book, my head was still telling me to go to sleep and no amount of fighting it was going to keep me awake for much longer anyway.

The book has a day-to-day theme going on with it and oddly enough the story was set in the February/March time frame of 2006. A few things caught my eye, mainly because March 2006 was such a difficult month for me. I noticed that chapter 7 is the only notice of the ex-husband (thus far) and this fell on the date of March 7, 2006. The reason this caught my eye was based on the fact that the very first line of the chapter read “Hello Joe”. I found it pretty freaky, this character is talking to her ex-husband the same day I lost Joe. I know that it’s purely a coincidence but it stood out for me, and probably had a lot to do with why I sat here for so long reading as much as I could before I dozed off.

I had some pretty strange dreams last night, not sure why but all family members that have passed on came to me and started yapping about something important, what the message was – I have no idea. I just think it’s strange that I haven’t dreamt of my Grandmother since I was 8 years old and there she was standing in front of my desk with some kind of a message that I just didn’t understand. I didn’t hear her, I knew she was talking to me, you can always see someone talking to you in your dreams. I’m just unsure of what was actually being said, I just remember screaming “Speak English” because it sounded like “Womp, Womp, Womp” whenever she opened her mouth.

Another interesting dream happened just as I’d dozed off to sleep. I’m unsure of whether or not it was based on the book or not but I was walking up my stairs (the one’s in NY, not DE) and at the top of the stairs was Tony Soprano’s mother (now deceased). I could literally see right through her, she looked at me with this evil grin on her face and then her eyes rolled up in the back of her head. I went to run inside but I couldn’t get my keys out of my pocket and I stood there screaming “Wake me up!”. When I finally did wake up it had only been about 20 minutes since I’d gone to bed. It was just one of those freaky dreams that chills you to the bone and sticks with you all freaking day.

And speaking of bone chilling, according to my weather monitor it’s supposed to get down to about 3¬?F tonight. A quick snow shower came through this evening but I haven’t been outside since about 1am to see what kind of “damage” was done. Down here you don’t get much, we’re too close to the ocean and everything tends to melt within an hour because of the salt in the air. I hear NY is getting some pretty decent snow, I kind of wish I could be up there right now to enjoy it but I have to accept the fact that Delaware will never be New York and I need to move on. It sucks, but nothing I can do about it.