Photography by Marc Appleton

Lotusland is a magical and rare place located in Santa Barbara, CA. This sprawling botanical garden was founded by former opera singer, and many times divorced socialite, Madame Ganna Walksa. Deciding six husbands was enough, she turned her attention full time to creating her amazing gardens. …

I don’t really review cozies, despite reading A LOT of them. For those unfamiliar, the cozy genre are generally “gentle” murders – no graphic violence,  not a lot of sex, blood or swearing, and the person who gets whacked deserves it. A lot of the focus on cozies is atmosphere …

The Black Dandy and Street Style
Shantrelle P Lewis

Dandy: A man who affects extreme elegance in clothes and manners; a fop.

Dandies, in this day and age, are a rare anachronism. People wear pajamas to the grocery store, and jeans to weddings. But the dandy holds the line to …

Christopher Fowler

By far the best in the series for awhile, The Lonely Hour has Bryant and May at their finest, weirdest, best. Spoiler alert: The memory issues from past books have totally solved/explained and these two octogenarian detectives have their snappy synapses firing at full. There’s plenty of the …

Obsession, Death, and Glory in American’s Most Extraordinary Treasure Hunt
Daniel Barbarisi

chasing the thrillImagine a wealthy art dealer, suddenly facing death. He decides he will have a last hurrah by hiding a treasure chest stuffed with gold, jewels, money and more. Clues to the hoard will be hidden in a biography …

OSS – The Director of Strategic Services

This fascinating little pamphlet was written in 1944 by the Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the FBI), and is filled with basic instructions on slowing and thwarting the enemy. There are no plans for rigging bombs, making poison or stealing state secrets. …

Cassandra Peterson

Everyone knows Elvira, even if they don’t know where they know her from. A long-running host for schlocky late night horror movies (the ones MST3K loves to mock), the “Elvira, Mistress of the Dark” brand grew to international fame. With a combo of blatant sexiness, chutzpah and cheesy …

Chuck Klosterman

For Gen-Xers like myself, the 90s were just a few years ago. We lived them, so how could we possibly not know all about them? And yet, Chuck Klosterman, the pop-culture philosopher for our generation, once again does a phenomenal job pointing out all the obvious things we …