Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Killer Nashville 2014

It’s refreshing, renewing, and exhausting, getting together with other mystery writers. I’m not even sure I can tell you about the bizarre (and fun) conversation at the banquet table with several mystery writers I had never met before. You know, the kind I mean. The one that would get you arrested in some places and dirty looks in all the others. I’ll just mention one small part: the opinion that the DC sniper made some mistakes and could have done it better. See?


The opulent Omni Hotel in Nashville


The forensics presentations were excellent. One by Dr. Mike Tabor, odontologist for the Tennessee medical examiner. He touched on identification by teeth, but got further into bite marks. Odontology, according to him, is a fancy word for dentistry.

Dr. Lyle did a talk on DNA and I learned the history of the different methods. It was first used for profiling in 1984 and the method now used, which needs much less DNA (even a single cell is enough), came into being in the 1990s. Now I know not to reference these things at a time when they didn’t exist.

One very weird thing he told us about is chimerism. This is where one fraternal twin absorbs the other in the womb and one child, a chimera, is born with two sets of DNA. When this happens, different body parts can have different DNA. A person also has two sets when he has had a bone marrow transplant. The blood of that person is the same as the donor, the rest of his body keeps its original DNA.


The two guests of honor were William Kent Krueger and Lisa Jackson. Listening to them was very worthwhile! I’ll blog more on that next week.

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

One Last Contest for Janet and Quincy

Janet wants to give away one more book this week. Hop over to her blog and tell us what you think Quincy is thinking--we have no idea!


http://janetcantrell.blogspot.com/2014/08/last-contest-before-release.html


Wednesday, August 13, 2014

That was hard!

I'm going to point you to the blog for Janet and Quincy again today, to announce the winner(s) from the cat tale posts last week.

I had to call in reinforcements!

http://janetcantrell.blogspot.com/2014/08/that-was-hard.html

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

FAT CAT STORY CONTEST!

Please visit Janet Cantrell’s blog today to get in on a short story (very short story) contest and to see a cute picture of Marilyn Levinson’s cat.