author du jour

If you enjoy light and humorous mysteries, you will enjoy Donna Andrews' Meg Langdon series.  I'm rererereading it at the moment, and laughing out loud as hard as I did the first time.  The first is Murder with Peacocks, followed by Murder with Puffins, Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos, We'll Always Have Parrots, Owls Well That Ends Well, etc, etc. 

In the latter, Meg and her fiance have recently bought a house and are holding a yard sale to get rid of the excess of junk to which the last owner was most attached.  Needless to say, someone is murdered and she has to solve the case, but prior to the murder Meg is describing to her fiance a particular lamp shade that, to her amazement, two buyers are fighting over:

"The lamp shade was huge--three feet tall, and equally wide at the base, though the sides curved in as they went upward and then flared out again, making it look like an inverted Art Nouveau birdbath.  Its dominant colors were orange and purple, though at least a dozen other hues appeared here and there in the trimmings.  And as for the trimmings, I had nothing against lace, fringe, braid, bows, beads, tassels, appliques, rosettes, silk flowers, rhinestones, prisms, or embroidery, but I thought that inflicting all of them on one defenseless shade was unforgivable."

Snort.  Chuckle.  Giggle.

Off to work...