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.

A town is the scene of what people do, become and have. Stabenow describes happy slow small towns with unusual people who are ever so slightly insane. Who might shoot people over candy bars, or murder them in quaint hotel rooms or share fried bread with a wolf. There are townsWhisper to the Blood by Dana Stabenow read by Marguerite Gavin

Arkady, the permanently grim, dejected, despondent Moscow cop wants another autopsy done on the body of a prostitute and finds his old friend Willie at the morgue, having moved in. Immense and unshaven, Willie Pezenko shuffled around the morgue like a wooly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hungThree Stations by Martin Cruz read by Ron McClarty

As tempting and tasty as yellow cake are these novels about single but not terribly singular women, suddenly alone or suddenly in trouble or suddenly displaced. If they had worked they become domestic, if they had had money they no longer do, if they had been married, they are divorced,Nosy Neighbor by Fern Michaels read by Andrea Gallo

"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

Although less terrible than usual, Brick can't do funny. And this book can be funny. The ram rod straight CIA trainer; the queer, ruthless, demented Director of Operations; the stubborn, nerdish, accidentally lucky pseudo-operative determined to avenge his murdered girlfriend..... Then of course he bumps into a woman who The Amateur: A Novel of Revenge by Robert Littell read by Scott Brick

There is something annoying, something unsettling, something demoralizing about a story in which  all the women are either murder victims,  embittered but useless mothers, faithful, ineffectual wives, or sexually charged students with dancers' bodies. Annoying, too, is witnessing an entire small town turn against an innocent man and his brainyThe Bone House by Brian Freeman read by Joe Barrett

Robin Cook Marker read by George Guidall Most bestselling writers, like Hollywood waiters, are really something else. Shrinks, lawyers, opthamologists. Divorced ex-cops. Sometimes a reporter. A confused priest or two. We excuse such slippery behavior when it gives us access to technical knowledge: why kill? how do cops catch criminals? whatRobin Cook Marker read by George Guidall

Charlie has been a guest and a prisoner of the dictator of Batanga for 12 years when he has an affair with the dictator's favorite wife. After the wife is tortured, Charlie extradites himself to America, and stands trial for an old murder. The crime is investigated, reconstructedPhillip Margolin, Fugitive, read by Jonathan Davis

Let us begin at the end, with Orson Scott Card telling us how the book did not begin: "Donald Mustard and his partners at Chair entertainment had the idea for an entertainment franchise called Empire about a near future American civil war... When I joined the project, to createEmpire by Orson Scott Card read by Rudnicki

How is it possible to account for irrationality in a scientific way? What kind of a science, what kind of a scientist studies the the irrational side of human behavior? How, moreover, can irrational decisions be measured, explained and controlled? Arielly describes experiments which do just this. The Upside of Irrationality by Dan Arielly

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

Self-righteous, five foot eleven cunt-cop does a "If I have to choose between doing the right thing and ratting on my cop-boyfriend I'd rather be a cunt" and spoils this perfectly curious re-take of vice-cop falls in love with wretched and beautiful prostitute. Don't you hate it when the PROTAGONIST isRed Light by T. Jefferson Parker

Yes, we know that it is very important for there to be a gun on the table and a timer, clicking down, on the first page of the story. Someone is murdered, and by the end of the story someone else is found culpable. Someone is training, and by theFirewatch by Nelson DeMille read by Scott Brick

I am reading three books, disrespectfully, carelessly, unthinkingly. After finishing The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet's Nest I decided that there was nothing more to read. Nothing else to read. Nothing to satisfy the specific hunger for more Girl. Nothing to rejoin the amorous journalist and the girl. WhatDoomed.