Reading Journal: "The Bookwoman's Last Fling"

This story centers around an avid book collector, Candice Geiger, dead now over 20 years. When her husband dies, Cliff Janeway is called in to inventory her extraordinary collection of children's books for the estate. Most of the volumes are rare, illustrated first editions. He soon realizes that some of the best books have been substituted with much cheaper replacements, but as the husband knew nothing about books, the theft could have happened many years earlier. Janeway also begins to suspect that Candice may have been murdered. As he investigates, he comes across a mixed bag of characters. One is Sharon, the daughter who already owns half the books and runs a farm for rescued horses. Much of the plot unfolds at California race tracks where Cliff goes undercover to scope out the people from Candice's shadowy past.

As in almost all of my reading journal spreads, this background had been painted without any book in mind. I found this photo on the cover of an investment newsletter and thought it was a good illustration for the story and the colors meshed well with these particular pages. I had made the pinkish strokes outward from the center just because I happened to have some of that color left on the brush after painting a totally different page. And as is often the case, it helped to tie the photo to the rest of the page since it's a tint of the rusty pink color at the top of the sky.

I was just playing around when I wrote out the title and author. All those curliques were a take-off on the word "Fling."