Your favorite places on earth--help needed

[Rhys Bowen]

My blogmates and I at The Lady Killers (www.theladykillers.typepad.com) started a list of our favorite places, either because they inspired a good mystery or because they helped us to relax enough to free our brains for future creativity, or just because they were so fabulous!

If anyone would like to share his or her favorite place with me, we'll post them in a special feature we're doing this summer called virtual vacation.

If you like, you can email me off list at [e-mail]

[Karyn J. Powers]

Rembrandtplein, Amsterdam.

[Todd Robinson]

On my last night in Hong Kong, my buddy and I decided to check out Wan Chai - despite several warnings. Many drinks, three clubs, six Russian women (one a former Pan-European kickboxing champion) and a karaoke bar later, it dawned on me that I had pissed off the local Triad leader (who also owned the club). Apparently he'd had his eye on the Russian lady who had decided that my lap was the best place to park herself. My buddy and I started giggling, since...well, hell...if we were going to die, we wanted to die fighting our way out of an underground Hong Kong nightclub.
Violence was avoided and we left the club with our skins attached and a full novel idea in my brain.

Oh...and the young Russian woman who was perched on my Levi's? She ran to Hong Kong three weeks earlier from the Soviet Union to escape her abusive Russian Mafia boyfriend.

I kid you not....