Howling Frog Books

 February's stories are "The Pearl of Price," a Parker Pyne story, and "The Affair at the Bunglalow, featuring Miss Marple. "The Pearl of Price" is set on a group tour of Egypt, a nice little closed group of people who do not know each other well and who come from all over.  The rich American's daughter has valuable screw-on pearl earrings, which she is forever losing.  Pretty soon one of the pearls is lost, and though it ought to be easy to find...it isn't there. Who took the pearl and where did they hide it?  Parker Pyne figures it out. This is a fun short piece, and brings up the eternal question: how does anyone ever stand wearing screw-on earrings?  I've tried them!  They hurt! In "The Affair at the Bungalow," we have a dinner party that includes some retired military and police men, a lovely and famous actress, and a clever modern writer along with his elderly aunt.  As they trade stories of crime and try to fool each other, the

 Well, I've spent most of this month doing things besides reading.  I guess you could call it a reading slump.  But I did read Ozma of Oz, which was a familiar book of my childhood! In this installment, we go back to Dorothy, who is accompanying her Uncle Henry on a voyage to Australia for his health -- an amusingly transparent method of getting Dorothy on a ship, since there is no way a Kansas farm family would send anybody to Australia when they could just go to Florida or someplace.  Nevertheless, to Australia they go, and Dorothy is swept overboard in a storm.  Luckily she manages to cling to a chicken coop, and pretty soon she and the chicken come to shore.  The hen starts talking, so we know that we're somewhere near Oz! Dorothy and Billina discover that they're in Ev, a land next to the desert that surrounds Oz, and they find the mechanical man Tik-Tok and wind him up, so he joins the team. The queen and all her children have been captured by the Nome King, and a nie