I'm three-quarters the way through City of Lost Girls by Declan Hughes, and I think I've found the author I'll be spending the next month with (he's written four other novels, so I'm thinking, hmmm, maybe one a week?). What's so appealing here is the writing. There's an Irish grace to it, no surprise, and a richness that is very unlike the spare prose of my favorite Swedish and Norwegian writers, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo. Hughes is an Irish Dennis LeHane.

Meanwhile I'm delighted to see that both Mankell and Nesbo have new books out or soon to come out.

I suppose, however, that I really ought to read something other than dark North Atlantic detective novels. So, branching out, next in my line-up--before Hughes no. 2--is Swamplandia, by Karen Russell. Something about the jacket and the feel of that book just made me want to take it home. But then, I've always been partial to alligators.

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By the way, I picked up Hughes' book at the Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino, Calif., a lovely bookstore in one of the lovelist towns in the world. My wife and I have gone back to the same inn--the Headlands Inn--and the same room in that inn, since 1982, and are delighted to report we really can't detect much physical change in the landscape, though several empty storefronts suggest the main commercial street got hit pretty hard by the recession of the last couple of years.

Funky detail alert: The bookstore happens to be in the groundfloor of a building that appeared in the movie The Russians Are Coming, a family favorite, in the scene where the hero, tied to a telephone operator by Alan Arkin and his crew from a stranded Soviet submarine, ends up tumbling down an exterior stairway, still attached to the operator. Mendocino looks all the world like a New England village and thus was chosen as the setting for the movie, which is supposed to be taking place on a Nantucket-like island in the Atlantic. For the same reason, the house occupied by Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote also is in Mendocino--its called Blair House--and is for sale, according to John, the bartender at the Mendocino Hotel who, by the way, makes a very good Manhattan.

Ten minutes down the coast highway there's another movie landmark, Heritage House, where Same Time Next Year was filmed. Unfortunately, Heritage House too appears to have been a victim of recession, and is closed, and looks forlorn indeed.

Back to Dublin, where tension is mounting....