Sunday is for beginnings, where we take a look at the start of a Peter Abrahams novel including those written under the Spencer Quinn moniker™. How about The Sound and the Furry? Especially because the digital edition is on sale for a few more days. The price? $1.99! Nowadays that’s pretty close to you getting paid! (I believe this was also the first time we used a reader-suggested title. Just a little fun thing about the series.) Also today, we’ve heard from a longtime friend of the blog who has been unable to post since the changeover to this format. She’s tried using her old email and a new one. Any advice on what she should do? I’ll relay it to her. Thanks.)

“One thing’s for sure,” the lawyer said, handing Bernie our check, “you earned every cent.”

Bernie tucked the check in – oh, no – the chest pocket of his Hawaiian shirt, just about his nicest Hawaiian shirt, with the hula dancers and the trombones, but that wasn’t the point. The point was we’d had chest pocket problems in the past, more than once. And possibly more than twice, but I wouldn’t know, since I don’t count past two. What I do know is that checks have a way of falling out of chest pockets.

“What’s he barking about?” the lawyer said.

Bernie glanced at me. “Just wants to get rolling,” he said. That wasn’t it at all: what I wanted was for Bernie to put that check in his front pants pocket where it would be safe. But then I realized that I did kind of want to get rolling. Wow! That was Bernie, knowing my own mind better than I did. And I knew his exactly the same way!