There are inside words and outside words. Sometimes outside words - like Inspector Wexford's "They don't have handbags anymore," - sound like inside words because they form a running commentary on something like the world. Sometimes, like Hannah Goldsmith's, they escape, aciduously, censoriously. Throughout theJohn Lee reads Ruth Rendell:End in Tears.

An intimate look at the arrangements, organization and order of small town French village life, through the eyes of the jovial, wise and well fed chief of police, for "...not  a single pig made it to market without some part of it being offered as part tribute part toll toBruno, Chief of Police by Martin Walker read by Robert Ian MacKenzie

Josee Rose of the Wall Street Journal reported this morning that Amazon.com has agreed to by the largest publisher of audiobooks in the States, Brilliance Audio.Amazon will buy Brilliance Audiobooks!

"You know how Thais are: totally fair minded Buddhists until their personal income is threatened." For we farang,  the improbability of Thailand is as good as fiction. Where else would one find a dejected pot-smoking homicide detective and his long-haired assistant, a "Kathoey transsexual who has not yet scraped together theThe Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett read by Stephen Hogan

Today's Wall Street Journal reports that Messrs. Gates and Jobs joked about the famous Apple commercials showing a boring P.C. suit and an eternally nerdy Mac user at a Carlsbad, California D: All Things Digital conference. "The art of those commercial is not to be mean. It'sBill and Steve and the Wall Street Journal's bad grammar

"John has left me his town. Although now that his town didn't have the children in it.." The demented but funny* ex-wife of a husband who should have come with instructions on how to load the dishwasher invites our sympathy because: 1. the ex-person has custody of the children 2. she isCleaning Nabokov's House by Leslie Daniels read by Bernadette Dunne

Food, sex, and Rome. Delicious words string together bodies of edible women and edible animals and recipes of both until it seems uncivilized to separate eating and coupling.The Food of Love::Anthony Capella :: Rocco Sisto

A bouquet of accidents pop up at the beginning of the story: a cab crash in Manhattan, a car crash in Darien, Connecticut, an overdose in Mitford...For the rest of this story, the notion of accident is under erasure.  What after all is an accident? Is the housing crisis anThe Accident by Linwood Barclay read by Peter Berkrot

At the end of this very long book,  a famous publisher asks an ex-novelist to write about Wall Street during the subprime fiasco. But the novelist can only write about the novelist. No characters, no plot, no events ever get beyond the "me" of this word dealer. Annoying, pizzicato readingDear Money by M. McPhee read by Kate Reading.

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

Slow, cloddish, cumbersome and overcooked dialogue stretches across this morality play about an ugly presidential election. Add the 'aching sadness' and 'fatal failures' and 'eyes shining with tears' of flat white characters, but read on. Hear the slimy campaign advise of slimy campaign managers: "Girlfriend is bad. BlackThe Race by Richard North Patterson Narrated by Michael Boatman

How fun to be a stubborn, sensible English widow who takes up decorating or hotelkeeping or moves to Brighton. The kind of fun that takes time: not like those television garden shows that demonstrate "how to transform an entire garden in a matter of five hours while the lady ofElvi Rhodes A House By the Sea read by Anne Dover

It is not  obvious that what happens to English in L.A. is natural, because what is natural in California is not natural anywhere else. But if nature is not local, what is?  What localizes language? Why does Hollywood Nate understand another cop who asks him whether an Indian girl isHollywood Moon by Joseph Wambaugh

A few Jewish words referring to a few ritual baked goods eaten by a few Jews does not a Jewish novel make. Nor does a description of a modestly clad woman with her hair tied back by a long scarf. If the Peter Decker novels wielded some specific charm byBlindman's Bluff by Faye Kellerman read by Mitch Greenburg

Publisher: Chivers North America,Pub Date: p2000.The Pushcart War between elevator operators and rich prick fathers with beautiful daughters.  CRAZY FOR CORNELIA by Gilson, Chris.