Obviously you’re all thinking, “Donald Sobel wrote an Encyclopedia Brown Mystery about the 1993 Georgia Satellites song?! Weird. But very intriguing!” Sadly, no. This was written eight years prior to its release. The solution is utter madness.

We went over some of the thousands and thousands of cozy mysteries out there before deciding on OWL BE HOME FOR CHRISTMAS as our 2025 cozy. Revisit the contenders!

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This is it, the final episode of Dan Brown’s Deception Point, a book so dumb it raises (lowers?) the level at which a 372 book can be labelled as “dumb.” It’s entire galaxies of dumb-ness. The list of things dumber than it is very small. Dumb and Dumber contains less than a third of the dumbness as this book. There was a lot to talk about here, not the least of which is the “gorge of teeth” that came at one of the Delta sisters (I assume they were a trio of dancing triplets, the book never explicitly says.)

*”Prize-winning astrophysicist Corky Marlinson….Corky Marlinson was as brilliant and respected as they came… Marlinson’s ideas on gravitational fields were legendary among NRO satellite engineers.”

Pigs are stolen. Gooses killed, gutted, de-feathered, roasted over spits and eaten by drifters. And, evidently, dogs are wounded. Idaville’s an odd place.

Can Mike crack the case?!

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Find out how this book compares to the works of Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf and Rush. And while you’re at it, follow the exploits of Hot Sexton and her father Senator Sexton Sedgewick. Does triple PhD Dr. Marlinson get his tongue caught in an old timey clothes wringer?! You’ll have to listen to find out. Track Mike’s results on Real or Fanfic and get a load of the Dumb Sentences of the Week.

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Watch goose* is a thing, everyone. Seriously. We don’t like it anymore than you do, but it’s a thing. Mike tries to crack the case.

*”Guard goose” would also be an accepted term.

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Courvoisier-sipping senator Sedgewick Sexton; the hideous, grotesque, smoke-spewing, long-limbed inhuman creature Marjorie Tench; and Deltas One, Two and Three are just a few of the characters discussed in this episode. So much happens. So many words are misused. So many editors went un-hired. It’s a wonder we could fit in Real or Fanfic as well as Dumb Sentences of the Week.

READING ASSIGNMENT: Read through Chapter 100. If you dare!

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For once, once, it’s a hitchhiker that’s hungry and not a damn hippo! Anyway, Conor throws Donald J. Sobel’s mystery at Mike and Mike attempts to hit it out of the park. Does he succeed? You’ll have to listen.

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Dan Brown is back! The author of Digital Fortress (and, okay, if I have to mention it, The Da Vinci Code) is typing up words and phrases and clauses as fast as his fingers can go. Most are, well, not very good – but there are a lot of them!

Yes, the episode is long. But think of it this way: if you are taking a dogsled trip somewhere above the Arctic circle, what else you got to do but listen, feed the dogs, hang onto the sled and not get thrown by helicopter into a ravine?

(We have pledged not to spend too long a time on this book so we’re doubling up our readings. That makes your assignment READ THROUGH CHAPTER 64. Then you will be the SHERIFF OF 64 CHAPTERS!)

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We kick off another voyage into the microchapter world of Dan Brown! Plus we’ll hear all about a recent humiliation Mike suffered on the tennis court and read some listener emails.

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Assignment: Read thru Chapter 31