• I have enjoyed all of Jeff Shaara’s books, but The Eagle’s Claw had a flaw in it, that being that Raymond Spruance, who commanded both the Enterprise and the Hornet in the battle, was not in the book. This left many questions about the last part of the battle unanswered in the novel. It seems unlike Shaara to omit a major character and/or part of a battle. So, I would have to give this book three stars if I were writing an Amazon review.  As always, I enjoyed the book and the approach to the story.
• Thank you to those of you who went over to Facebook and chipped in a few dollars in my birthday fundraiser for Sun Kissed Acres Equine Rescue. My modest $300 goal was met by your generosity, plus, I got a nice thankyou note from the farm.
• My actual birthday is tomorrow. No need to send lavish gifts or cash because that might push me into a higher tax bracket. (Yeah, right.) My wife made a cherry pie, my favorite, and we cheated by having some of it last night.
• I have given up getting the rights to my audiobooks, Emily’s Stories and Jock Stewart and the Missing Sea of Fire assigned to me now that my former publisher is out of business, leaving all of us seeing our books still being sold with the sellers keeping the royalties. There should have been a clause in the contract and I kept pushing for it, but my former publisher was lazy in many ways about such things. My current publisher keeps up with her authors!
• I’m reading an interesting suspense novel by Christine Carbo set in Glacier National Park called The Wild Inside. For a Glacier fan, it’s fun following a story set in a place one knows well. She lives in a town next to the park, so she knows the territory. I might just have to read a few more from her “Glacier Mystery Series.”
• Yes, I’m still working on another novel set in Glacier, but at my advanced age, I type very slowly. This one is a contemporary fantasy, like The Sun Singer and Sarabande. It’s been fun returning to the Montana mountains.

–Malcolm