After doing this job for two decades, there aren’t too many “firsts” left. I’d like to thank Shelly Reuben for giving me one recently – the chance to write my first “blurb.”

While many people refer to any short brief they ask us to put in the paper as a “blurb,” what I’m referring to here is its more or less official meaning – a book jacket mini-review.

Evening Sun readers know Shelly Reuben as the author of a monthly column, “Tilting at Windmills,” right here on this very page, in which she expounds on myriad topics – family, friends, and, frequently, her love of books. There’s a good reason for that: in addition to being a roving newspaper columnist and arson investigator (maybe not in that order), Shelly is also an accomplished author.

That’s how we first came to know her here at the paper, when one of my long-gone staff writers was contacted to review ... I’m pretty sure it was 2006’s “Tabula Rasa,” a fictionalized account of famed serial killer Waneta Hoyt, who murdered five of her own children over the years in nearby Newark Valley.