Charles Finch

I'm blogging from the lobby of my hotel in the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, a city I'm visiting for the first time. (Ways you know you're in the lobby of a hotel: a soft version of Girl From Ipanema is playing.) Last night I went to Giordano's Pizza on an urgent recommendation - absolutely delicious - looked at Robie House, and drove through Wrigleyville. And today I'll make my first visit to the Art Institute of Chicago. I'm an avid museum-goer and any time I can visit a major museum for the first time, I get very excited. I've been to the Met and the Louvre so many times that the idea of a new place is thrilling.

More updates as I do more. Any recommendations?

Here's a photo gallery of the new Alice in Wonderland, with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Helena Bonham Carter as the Red King, and Matt Lucas of Little Britain (one of my favorite shows when I lived in England) as Tweedledee and Tweedledum. I have to say the makeup and visual effects are pretty astonishing, but I found Sweeney Todd hard to sit through. Until some reviews reassure me I'll be a skeptic. Still, interesting to see.

A house that was under continuous construction for 38 years to appease the ghosts of a rifle manufacturer's victims. Pretty eerie.

A great collection of ads from the World Wildlife Fund - both clever and thought provoking.

I usually rotate through a few books at a time. Right now:

Heat - Bill Buford
The Janissary Tree - Jason Goodwin
Before She Met Me - Julian Barnes

One memoir about an American cook, one mystery novel about an Ottoman eunuch, and a post-modern novel about jealousy in 1980's Britain. More varied than my usual haul!

Curious to hear what anyone out there is reading - I'm always looking for a new book to read.

I receive frequent e-mails from people who have read one or both of my first two books and want to know if there will be a third, and if so when it will come out. The answer is that there will be a third book, and it will be in bookstores by early November of this year.

I'm really excited about this one. It's called The Fleet Street Murders. As many aficionados of Victorian England know, Fleet Street was the center of the newspaper business, where there were both editorial offices and actual printing presses, which one could hear screeching throughout the night. The printing presses moved to the suburbs in the mid-20th century, and the last editorial staff left the pricey offices there less than a decade ago. But the 19th century was the golden age of Fleet Street, when wonderful pubs full of drunken journalists lined the streets, and scribes hustled back from Parliament and Scotland Yard to submit their articles by deadline.

That's the world my new Charles Lenox mystery is set in. On Christmas day, 1867, two journalists in entirely different parts of town are murdered moments apart. Suspicion instantly links the two events, and Lenox, with the help of his butler, Graham, his apprentice, Lord John Dallington, and his old friend Thomas McConnell, has to get to the bottom of a puzzle which reaches back into the past for its solution.

In the meanwhile Lenox is also engaged in a heavily competitive race for Parliament, and the book has a close-up look at a Victorian political race. There are also new permutations in the ongoing half-romance between Lenox and his closest friend, Lady Jane.

The book is available for pre-order now, at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books-A-Million.

Whether you order it now, buy it in November, borrow it from a library or a friend, or pick it up in a second-hand shop two years from now, I hope you'll love reading it as much as I loved writing it. What a great job I have!

When I was 12 I got a blue Sony Walkman for my birthday. A 13 year old tries switching from his iPod to what I had back then, with very funny results.