I love good guys

What's Good?  I'm very happy to get to make September's recommendation-of-the-month Nancy K.'s "Deadly Stakes" (2000, PG-13), which uniquely stars Nick and Bourbon.  This character study wrapped in action and suspense is set at a luxury casino resort between the second World War and the McCarthy hearings, and pits Nick against Bourbon for first one life and then another.

     The budding archaeologists he taught in Chicago were under the impression he was doing research on the cave paintings at Lascaux in the Dordogne during the summer break. In reality, he was seeing to some of the properties he had owned since the mid-1700s...
     You can take the boy out of the aristocracy, but you can't take the aristocracy out of the boy, he thought ruefully...

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What's New on FKFic-L?  On the admin side, the upcoming FKFic-L War game has been scheduled for 10/01 through 10/15, and List Manager lisamcdavid has a new email address.  On the story side, fkfic-l saw two tales posted in August: ( list with links )

This was my first lengthy fanfiction.  I'm still pleased with it.  It shows traits of its age (among other things, I appear to have owned stock in semi-colons), but it musters an actual mystery, and builds a future and a past for the characters.  When writing it, I didn't make an outline, and I'm not sure I even knew how it would end when I began -- imperatives when writing today -- but it came like an onrushing wave, covering all the ground, and then there it was.

Tracy's guy, Paul, is my best original character yet.  Her coworkers and the people from whom she gets clues aren't just stick figures, either.  I seem to have felt much more free to invent guest stars in those days, for some reason.  You can't let them overshadow the canonical characters, of course, but the presence of guest stars is certainly canonical; rereading this story has made me wonder where that's gone for me.

	•	Title:	"Corners of the Mind"
	•	Length:	~32,200 words
	•	Date:	Posted to FKFic-L in June 1997
	•	Rating:	PG-13 (m/f)
	•	Summary:	Resurging memories plunge Tracy into the unsolved mysteries of Natalie's murder and Nick and Vachon's disappearances.
	•	Setting:	Three years after "Last Knight"
	•	Characters:	Tracy, Reese, Lacroix, Janette, Vachon, Screed, Bourbon, Jenny Schanke, Others
	•	Quotation:	"She told him everything she had learned about that wrinkle in their reality -- everything, except that her own blood spoke of apricots and calla lilies. For now, she kept that to herself."