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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Night Flight to Murder Town – A Marshall James Thriller (Chapters 22 -24 w/YouTube)
Welcome back to Fearsome Fiction, and to Night Flight to Murder Town: A Marshall James Thriller.
When we last left Marshall, he was finding his footing in a New York City that was as thrilling as it was foreign — a city that moved faster than he did, that asked more of him than he expected, and that seemed to be keeping secrets at every turn.
In tonight’s chapters, those secrets begin to take on weight. Trent hands Marshall a small yellow envelope — a floppy disk he calls “insurance” — and refuses to say more. It’s the kind of thing a man hands off only when he’s afraid of what might happen to it. Or to him.
Marshall puts the envelope away and goes on with his evening, because what else do you do? You put on a borrowed coat, you navigate your first New York City subway ride — tokens and all — and you head to Chelsea for what you tell yourself is just dinner. And maybe something more.
What he finds at Leland’s apartment, though, isn’t dinner. It’s a little white pill and a great deal of persuasion. And with one small word — sure — Marshall James crosses a line he can’t uncross.
Chapters twenty-two, twenty-three, and twenty-four. A disk full of secrets. A train into the dark. And the first of many falls to come.
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Savvy Senior: Understanding the Social Security Breakeven Age
By Jim Miller
Dear Savvy Senior,
I’m trying to figure out the best time for my wife and I to start taking our Social Security retirement benefits and would like to understand the breakeven age. What can you tell me?
–Strategizing Sam
Dear Sam,
As you approach retirement, one of the most important financial decisions you’ll face is when to begin collecting Social Security retirement benefits. A useful concept to guide your thinking is the “breakeven age,” which helps you evaluate the trade-off between taking a reduced benefit early versus a higher one later. Here’s what you should know.
SSA Waiting Game
The Social Security Administration allows you to start collecting your retirement benefits as early as age 62. However, your monthly benefit will be permanently reduced – about .5 percent each month – if you claim before your full retirement age (FRA), which is 67 for those born in 1960 or later. Conversely, for every year you delay claiming beyond your FRA – up to age 70 – your benefit amount increases 8 percent each year. Your benefit maxes out at age 70, so there’s no financial incentive to wait longer.
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Book Review: Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir, by Jayne Anne Phillips
By Terri Schlichenmeyer
The Bookworm Sez“Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir” by Jayne Anne Phillips
c.2026, Knopf $28.00 208 pagesThree. Two.
One.
Not that your parents were counting, but to them, it seemed as if you were born one day and then you were off like a rocket. Off to college, a good life, the kind of adventure they never had. Time zoomed past while they gave you a good launching pad and then, as in the new memoir, “Small Town Girls” by Jayne Anne Phillips, they sent you out among the stars.
“Home” means something different to just about everyone but for Phillips, it’s “a small town, nestled in the Allegheny Mountains of north central West Virginia… where history is interspersed with family stories and myths.” It’s where everyone knew everyone else, where poverty lived next to solid middle-class, where kids played with one another outside as much as they could. It’s where Phillips grew up.
“We seem to have lived here forever,” she says, “even before we were born.”
Her hometown is the kind of place where there are parades on every holiday, complete with school bands and girls twirling shiny batons. Her mother taught at the local school, where Phillips attended after a summer of Bible school; once a week, she and her mother went to the beauty parlor, where Phillips loved the feminine mystery of the place but she got a pixie cut there once, and hated it.
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LGBT Senior’s On the Map: An Ultimate Road Trip – Wilmington, Baltimore, and Home (Part II)
After a wonderful time in Savannah we headed to Wilmington. As always, a ‘6 1.2’ drive turned out to be 8 hours. Looking at the distance and time required to get somewhere on a GPS map only applies to the hours you spend behind the wheel. There are bathroom breaks, gas breaks, and food breaks that all have to be added in. For that reason we won’t do a road trip again without adding a couple more days so that we don’t spend more than 4 hours driving. Live and learn.
The Drive North: Coastal Georgia into the Carolinas
Leaving Savannah, the route north along the coast is a different experience than the inland drive down. US-17 through coastal Georgia and South Carolina is older, slower, and richer in atmosphere than the interstate. You pass through small coastal towns, cross tidal rivers, catch glimpses of marsh grass stretching to the horizon. It’s the kind of driving that reminds you why people took road trips before the highway system made everything faster and flatter.
If time allows, the stretch through the South Carolina Lowcountry repays attention. The landscape here is haunting in the best sense — wide, quiet, shaped by water in ways that make the land feel provisional, like the marsh is always negotiating with the shore about where exactly the boundary should be.
Wilmington, North Carolina: Port City with a Lot Going On
Wilmington occupies a particular sweet spot — large enough to have real culture and energy, small enough to feel navigable and human. Sitting at the mouth of the Cape Fear River, it has the easy confidence of a port city that has been doing its own thing for a long time and doesn’t feel the need to explain itself.
The downtown riverfront is genuinely lovely — a walkable stretch along the water with the kind of mix of old buildings and new energy that a city gets right when it’s paying attention. The historic district holds its own against more famous Southern cities, with antebellum architecture and tree-lined streets that feel lived-in rather than curated.
Wilmington is also the gateway to some of the best beaches on the East Coast. Wrightsville Beach is minutes away, and even if your trip isn’t a beach trip, it’s worth a morning walk along the shore before you head north. The Atlantic here is warmer than you’d expect and the stretch of coast is uncrowded by the standards of the mid-Atlantic.
The city has a creative undercurrent — film production has been based here for decades, and there’s an arts and music scene that punches above its size. Give it time and it gives back.
Must Eat
We had what I consider the best meal of the trip at Sugo Italian Steakhouse, rightly considered one of the best restaurants in Wilmington,
Tucked inside the Hotel Ballast on the downtown waterfront, the restaurant is the creation of Ace and Jamie Alfalla, who relocated from Long Island to Wilmington in 2021 carrying decades of hospitality experience, and their New York roots are evident in every dish. The kitchen is led by Chef Thomas Calhoun, and the house red sauce — sugo being the Italian word for sauce — serves as the philosophical and culinary heart of the menu, anchoring everything from homemade lasagna to pollo parmigiana. The menu also features dry-aged steaks alongside Italian specialties like veal Milanese, carbonara, and an aragosta pasta with twin lobster tails. Guests can choose between the lively bar lounge with communal seating or the more formal main dining room with sweeping views of the Cape Fear River. Worth every penny, and it takes quite a few.
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The Twist Podcast Gets a New Video Promo
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LGBT Senior’s On the Map: An Ultimate Road Trip – Winchester, Roanoke, and Savannah (Part I)
By Mark McNease
The backstory on this is a little long, so I’ll just say the genesis of the trip was to meet up with two other couples in Savannah, John and Robert, and Jean and Cindy. I don’t like flying unless I have to, and doing it for a three-night stay wasn’t appealing. I suggested instead that Frank and I drive and turn it into a long road trip. Our travel companion Michael, who often goes on cruises with us, joined the fun, so last Saturday we packed up the car and headed off for an eight-nighter that included a stop in Winchester, VA, to have lunch with Michael’s cousins and his wife, then Roanoke, Savannah, Wilmington, Baltimore, and finally home. This part I: Winchester for lunch, then on to Roanoke and Savannah.
Lunch in Winchester
This looked like a really cool town and I wish we’d have more time to spend there. A fair was going on, and the central walkway was filled with vendors. I saw a tarot card reader I would have loved to get a peek at my future from, but we had to eat and get back on the road. It was a quickie, but worth it.
Water Street Kitchen sits right in the heart of historic Old Town Winchester, Virginia, where Chef Dan Kalber turns classic Americana into something worth going out of your way for. Drawing on locally sourced ingredients to ground the menu in the region rather than the generic. The setting is informal and relaxed, with a large menu at reasonable prices and generous portions, and a vintage interior and patio that make it equally good for a leisurely lunch or a full dinner.
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LGBT Senior Featured Share: 150 Homes in 10 Years – How the Foster Care System Fails Trans Kids
This story was originally published by Uncloseted Media, an LGBTQ focused investigative news outlet.
Transgender youth in foster care face abuse, instability and new federal policies that are making it even harder for them to feel safe.
Sam DonndelingerPhoto by Mark Felix for Uncloseted Media. Editor’s note: This article includes mention of suicide and self-harm. If you are having thoughts of suicide or are concerned that someone you know may be, resources are available here.
At 8 years old in rural Kansas, Hayden Dawson remembers being forced to eat outside with the dogs.
Other times, they weren’t fed at all.
“I would chew sunflowers outside because I was so hungry until my face would become splotchy with a rash,” Hayden, now 20, told Uncloseted Media.
Photo by Mark Felix for Uncloseted Media. Hayden, who is nonbinary and gender fluid, says whenever they wanted to wear boy clothes, play with boy toys or express themself in a gender nonconforming way, their foster parents were “highly offended” and worried that Hayden would be a “bad influence on the other kids.”
They lived in the turberlance for eight months until their caseworker changed their placement after noticing the severity of Hayden’s weight loss and the rash spreading across their face.
But the next home was not safe either. Or the one after that.
Photo by Mark Felix for Uncloseted Media. “You have to pick and choose,” Hayden says. “Do I wanna be happy in the identity that I am and the body that I want to have, or do I want to survive?”
From age 8 to 18, Hayden was placed in over 150 foster homes. They say roughly 80% of the homes were “non-accepting”: their foster parents refused to use their chosen name, called them a girl, told them God doesn’t love them and they’re going to hell, and physically beat them with the Bible as they chanted, “Be gone, Satan.”By the time Hayden was a teenager, they became suicidal, cycling through mental health facilities and hospitals.
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LGBT Senior’s Featured Essay: A Win-Win, by Rick Rose
Winner Winner
By Sup. Rick Rose
The headlines came in fast Tuesday night. Winners and losers. Who’s up, who’s down. The tallies rolled in across Dane County — this one wins, that one loses, on to the next race.
I was on that list. After four years serving District 16 as County Board Supervisor, the voters chose someone new. In the language of election night, I lost.
But that framing is wrong.
Democracy isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s a hand-off of trust. The people weigh in, they make a choice, and then something remarkable hopefully happens — the person leaving makes room, and the person arriving steps up. That’s not defeat. That’s the whole point.
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The Twist 325: Weekly News Roundup Returns, Road Trip Fun Facts, and Rick Interviews Enjoyiana Nururdin
Episode 325 of The Twist is packed. Mark and Rick dig into the week’s biggest news stories in their Weekly News Roundup — the headlines, the highlights, and the takes you won’t get anywhere else. Then things get a little lighter with Road Trip Fun Facts, just in time for the open road season. And Rick sits down with Enjoyiana Nururdin, journalist and lifestyle content creator, for a conversation about her work, her voice, and what drives her to tell the stories she tells.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic ‘The Mystery of the Yellow Room’ by Gaston Leroux (Chapters 1 – 6)
Fearsome Fiction Podcast: Genre Classic Series The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux — Chapters 1–6
Let’s talk about a book that has been quietly influencing mystery writers for over a hundred years. The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux was published in 1907, and it did something so clever, so carefully constructed, that readers and writers are still talking about it. You may know Leroux from The Phantom of the Opera — but this is the book that made him a legend among mystery aficionados.
And once you spend the first six chapters inside the Château du Glandier, you’ll understand why.
An Impossible Crime
Here’s what we know. Mademoiselle Stangerson was attacked inside her laboratory — a small room with yellow wallpaper that gives the novel its name. The door was bolted from the inside. The windows were secured. No one could have gotten in, and no one could have gotten out. And yet the evidence of violence is everywhere: blood, a weapon, signs of a brutal, terrifying struggle.
Leroux doesn’t bury the lead. He plants the impossibility right in front of you in the opening chapters and essentially says: go ahead, figure it out. Most readers can’t. That’s the fun.
