The Authorized Version

When I first heard of Angels Flight, Los Angeles’ unique funicular railway, I was fascinated, but thought that, like so many bits of history, it had crumbled with time. My friend Alice Duncan’s cozy murder mystery Angels Flight is set in 1920s Los Angeles. What fun for heroine Mercy Alcutt to ride that nifty one-stop train to work, I thought—such a shame such things don’t exist anymore.

How wrong I was. When my husband was planning our Anniversary celebration in Los Angeles recently, he stumbled across a...

 When German author E.T.A. Hoffman wrote his short story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” in 1816, he could have had no idea that he would be impacting children around the world for centuries.

Although the original story is far more complicated than the ballet version we are familiar with, the basic elements remain the same. It begins on Christmas Eve with Godfather Drosselmeyer bringing mechanical toys to the children. In true ...

The Christmas preparations at Badminton house were complete to a shade. Georgiana had seen to that: The Christmas pudding well-stirred, the three-tier kissing bough hanging in the center of the ballroom, the yule log ready to set ablaze...

If only she could finish this one last task. She had already ruined several sheets of her mother’s best writing parchment with cross-outs and ink splotches. All the Beaufort children had composed Christmas wishes for family members since they could first hold a pen. Why should this one for her cousin be any different? 

A Christmas prayer...

Okay, I’m not at the English seashore anymore. But Jane Austen was never very far away from it, as Collins Hemingway, our guest speaker reminded us at our annual tea in honor of Jane Austen’s birthday.

The spectacular event was sponsored by the Southern Idaho Chapter of the Jane Austen Society of North America. It began early for me when my daughter-in-law picked me up.

We set up the book table at the Emporium, featuring Austen-themed books for gifts, children, and the Jane Austen Book Club.

Also my two Austen Titles, A Jane Austen Encounter...

Yes, it’s true—my husband and I had breakfast with the princesses on our recent visit to Disney World. And we didn’t even have any of our grandchildren with us. It was my husband’s choice because the breakfast they offered sounded the best.

But we hadn’t been at Norway’s Akershus castle at Epcot Center very long when I began to see a deeper meaning. Watching the delight of all the children, parents, grandparents and...

My first visit to Niagara-on-the-Lake was many years ago when our son, who lived in Buffalo at the time, took us across the border for a visit. I instantly fell in love. English-themed shops, amazing floral displays everywhere, an authentic Edwardian hotel...

Little did I realize that was only the tip of the iceberg. In 2012 my husband, a devout “Wall Street Journal” reader, saw a rave review of the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake. Yes! We had already planned a trip to...