Now hearing the case of: Chapter Two- In The Shadow Of Gotham

"Give me a man or woman who had read a thousand books and you give me an interesting companion. Give me a man or woman who has read perhaps three and you give me a dangerous enemy indeed."
-Anne Rice, The Witching Hour

Hello again! I just have to tell you how much I love these quotes that I'm putting in the beginning of each post. There's this great website that has them all listed out for me (If it were up to my memory, you would be quoteless!) and somebody (maybe the community?) has rated them according to something, but there are stars next to it so yeah, anyways though here's the link: Reading Quotes. Enjoy!

All right, second thing, I have noticed how weird this page makes the body of the text look for these posts and I'm sorry, I'll try to get that sorted out to make it wider and save your scroll wheel/ touchpad.

But alas! I must stop going on tangents and give you the summary of (a rather short) chapter two!

So we ended chapter one with Ziele rushing outside to meet his partner, Joe Healy, who has found something of importance to the case. And it turns out he has found two very important things! First off, he has found muddy footprints leading in and out of the house. The mud isn't yet dry, so that must mean that the man who had committed the crime came from the woods behind the Wingate home. These footprints were measured and photographed for later. One thing that struck odd to Ziele was the way the print was pressed, with a well defined toe and a smudged heel. This would have shown that he had something caked onto the back of his boot, or he had a limp. This would normally mean that the person is old, has a cane, and/or had broken a leg/hip and it hadn't healed right? The last sentence was all me simply assuming stuff, but it's a possibility.

The second thing found was a locket, covered with mud and blood and engraved with 'For S.W.'. This locket was tied to a blue ribbon and was engraved with this really fancy word that translates into 'EXPENSIVE'. Inside were mini-portraits of an older man, and Sarah. This is mentioned later in the chapter, but it is kind of odd to have a picture of yourself in a locket. Normally you would have pictures of mom and dad, son and daughter, cousins, brothers, sisters, but yourself? Who does that??

But anyways, after those two discoveries, Joe and Ziele decide that the house should be cleared for the night and proceed to do so. On his way to grab his things, Ziele is reminded that Abigail is waiting in the library for him and he needed to ask her some things. As they speak there isn't really anything important until she asks where Stella, their maid, is. All of her clothes and her suitcase were still at the house, and she had no friends nearby because she had only been in the area a few months.

So we'll keep that in mind. Next is some more information about happenings at the approximate time of the murder. So the murder happened at about three o'clock. Convenient, because that's when everyone will have left the house that day. Maud Muncie, the head cook, housekeeper, and mother of Charlie Muncie was out shopping, Abigail was out walking the footballs- sorry, the terriers, and Mrs. Virginia Westgate went out for tea with Ms. Stratton. Very convenient, right? Abigail did mention one oddity with the afternoon though, there was an odd man walking in the forest wearing a 'bushy hat'. Do we have out murderer? I think not. If the murderer were to approach the house through the forest, he wouldn't have walked so close to the road/sidewalk that he could be seen. Not in the right mind of a murderer anyways.

These were the big events of the chapter though, some small things like Mrs. Wingate not wanting to leave the home that night happened towards the end of the chapter, but that was all of the major things. As usual, thank you for reading and since this was such a short chapter, later today I will be posting the summary of chapter three!

And away we go!

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it." - Samuel Johnson         All right, starting the book assignment thing-a-ma-bob! And step one to world domination (or reading the book, whatever you want to call it) is breakdown of the summary of the book in question. So here we go! (And a quick heads up, a lot of this information is STRAIGHT out of the  summary, so I'm no Sherlock Holmes.)        The setting is Dobson, New York... And according to the great and glorious Google... Dobson doesn't exist.         So now that we've moved past that, the year is 1905. I guess some cool things happened in 1905. Las Vegas was founded... founded... that was a long time ago! This was also the year Einstein presented his Theory of Relativity, So I guess that's pretty important. But I guess other than that, it was a boring year, so this books events should mark a fairly large event, shouldn't it?

       Next up is a main character: Detective Simon Ziele.  Simon meaning "to hear/be heard" and Ziele meaning... well I actually couldn't find an exact meaning, but I guess it is a real last name... somewhere out there. He is a widower, due to the fact that his wife died on the Gen. Solcum on June 15, 1904 in the East River, New York City, New york. This event actually happened (thank you Google!) and claimed the lives of 900-1000 people on board. According to what I've read, the boat had a fire in the lower decks and, because of it's swift speed, caused the entire boat in flames in the middle of the river. So Detective Ziele moved North of NYC. 

        Now to the case! A young girl, Sarah Wingate, was murdered in her bedroom in the middle of the day in the winter of '05 (the same year the book is set in). Now I'm just thinking here, but for a young girl to be murdered in her bedrooms in the middle of the day, this needs to have been a family member, delivery person, close family friend, or somebody that worked on the house that knows the ins and outs (what kind of locks they would have on the doors, where you can enter unseen, how you could hide inside the house well. That kind of thing.)

         Yay for more new characters! Okay, now we have someone named Alistar Sinclair. I looked up the name and found that Alistar means "mans defender" in one translation, and Sinclair means "from Saint-Clair." Saint-Clair is a place in northern France supposedly. Anyways, this Alistar Sinclair is a "noted criminologist" at Columbia University. According to the summary she has one research subject, Michael Fromley, that she offers evidence about. It says nothing about possible other work, and the book might not either. But I guess if you're going to do study somebody/something, you might as well put all of your effort into it, right? Back on topic, this Fromley fellow seems to have been muttering things that sound shockingly close to facts about this case. Obviously he's nuts, just saying.

        Detective Ziele I guess teams up with Mr. Sinclair to solve the murder and bring peace justice back to the imaginary town of Dobson, New York! One thing that puzzled me about the summary was one line of text. Blah, blah, blah, catching killers, haunted dudes... a-ha! "...while on the run from his own demons." Ziele's wife died, so I guess that would make him... slightly crazy for a while. but from his "demons"? Maybe he has PTSD and this case brought out the bad effects? I don't know, but I soon will!

      Not sure what's up with the formatting issue at the top, but thanks for reading my little blog over here in the corner of the massive sea of blogs, and if you have any feedback feel free to leave a comment or use the little rating checkboxes!