Ed McBain's DOLL  (Pouty D, drag the O, tongue heavy on the L.)  is bedtime reading. The warped, lusty, utterly female voice of this slut-goddess kicks you in the groin, cuffs you to the radiator, and feeds you sex and ham sandwiches. You, or rather Steve Carella, who rarely gets tangled up withDOLL by Ed McBain read by

There is no question that there is a story here, about an otherwise nice city and an otherwise nice cop who is married to a rather understanding Englishwoman.  But it is not a story about the city and the cop and the Englishwoman in the 1960s. It is not enough toToo Many Murders by Colleen McCullough read by Charles Leggett

Fri Feb 20, 2004 Interesting how beauty and moral corruption are coupled in Lescroart's typical female. Especially the typical female lawyer. Messaging sexuality, too rich, too smart, too independent, too competitive:: the wet dream bitch of every lawyer wearing panties underneath his three piece suit. The black-oriental female associate working at HardyThe Second Chair by John T. Lescroart

"Don't you know I'm going to live happily ever after anyway?" After painting, waxing, polishing, wallpapering, and flowering up her old Nantucket house, Nan tells Sara about a man she met and loved. Sarah replies: but wouldn't it be nice if you met him again and fell in love and livedThe Beach House by Jane Green read by Cassandra Campbell

Mike Lawson is very very good. He is even better read by Joe Barrett. De Marco is a 'bagman' with a law degree, who even passed the Virginia Bar but never practiced law, whose happy aunt or godmother got him a job working for the fat, charming, lecherous, Speaker of theHouse Justice by Mike Lawson read by Joe Barrett

The salad dressing was the only one Partain ever used: "9 parts olive oil, one part red wine vinegar, vinegar soaked salt, ground black pepper and more garlic than most people liked." Write this down. Ross Thomas' recipes are rare, legendary and authoritative. As are his stories, his characters, andAh, Treachery! by Ross Thomas read by Frank Muller

Although I didn't see her face, I knew that the woman in the coloring chair was beautiful. It wasn't just because she had long, lush, gorgeous hair, but because she was tearing out a page of WWD, where she had eyed another beautiful woman with long hair. And beautiful womenI Remember Nothing by Nora Ephron read by Nora Ephron

Everything good comes together in this slow moving L.A. smoothie with the wizened, reflective, and much humbled Harry Bosch. Gone is the bull in the china shop attitude, the stubborn in your face overconfidence. In its place is the humility that comes from being too old or at least olderThe Overlook by Michael Connelly read by Len Cariou

Why isn't this a Doris Day movie? Perhaps because Rock Hudson would never have accumulated old washing machines and bowling balls in the garage; and Doris Day's anger never lasted longer than a bubble bath. Otherwise, Doris Day could have played this pretty, perky, 53 year old wife who breaksSearching for Paradise in Parker, PA by Kris Radish read by Barbara McCullough

Read by Stephen Lang who is good doing liddle giwls and the monotones of the personal(it)y disordered but not wonderful doing Barty who is (we guess) the hero. Unless the real hero is: the theory of quantum mechanics as interpreted by Feynman and the possibility of understanding that things are always all theFrom the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang

There is something beautiful and more than beautiful about these women who enjoy their kitchens, who love  all the rooms of domesticity.   Jane gives us wives, book club ladies and hostesses, in Manhattan or Westchester, well groomed and well mannered and well off, obedient to husbands or mothers in lawPromises To Keep by Jane Green read by Cassandra Campbell

A Bruegellian world of busy little people working very hard and magical children repeating absolutely useless gestures: marvellous Maeve Binchy. Eddie's dressmaker mother is surrounded by patterns and perpetually draped in some nearly finished garment as she sews and listens to the radio. "Let's just agree that he didn't keepThe Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy read by Barbara Caruso

Journalists must either eat or be eaten by more and more information. How to eat? Well, there's Excel. And if Excel can't make sense of "the new types of data" that Wikileaks was producing, then maybe a "data visualization expert" could make a pretty picture out of bomb explosion statistics.WikiLeaks by David Leigh, Luke Harding, Ed Pilkington, Robert Booth, Charles Arthur, narrated by Paul Michael Garcia

"Don't make any major changes in the first year" ... they say at AA. Matt Scudder has five or six weeks not to decide what he's going to do about Jan, a girl he sees Saturday night and Sunday morning ... "Some people say not to make any major changes forA Drop of the Hard Stuff by Lawrence Block read by Tom Stechschulte

Couples. Kellerman's shrink narrator is full of meticulous, obsessive, data-driven characterizations of L.A. couples and couplings. Milos and Rick, for instance. Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high priced West Hollywood salon. Milos drives every two months to La Brea and Washington where he hands hisKellerman's Gone