There is more than one mystery here. First, how does one make sense of the handful of quotes from Plato's Republic which are scattered about this book like annoying commercials for a new Greek candidate? Especially when there is no candidate. Plato's ideas are credited with breeding aThe Fifth Vial read by Michael Palmer read by J. Charles

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

Firm writing, good characters, heavy social issues, but no story. Meet Ruth. A divorced mother who teaches sex education at a public high school is more or less forced to teach abstinence according to a rosy if delusional Christian fundamentalist agenda. Meet Tim: divorced, saved and reformed byThe Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta read by Campbell Scott

What happens to a hard cop in a hard city in an era below good and evil.Hollywood Station by Joseph Wambaugh

A distressing picture of the unhappy situation of the losing class within a classless society. Grace is a 37 year old female loser within this losing class. She lives at the edge of a self-consciously wealthy Palm Beach ghetto of sectional wealth. She has a teenage bitch-daughter with a whine.Mourning Glory by Warren Adler::

Forget the tax on sugar. Tax bad dialogue, dreadful characterizations, idiotic psychological profiles. To wit: When he was a child the twitch had made him the target of merciless teasing and bullying. It had made him burn with hatred. And that hatred had driven him to succeed. Victor Orlov wanted toThe Defector by Daniel Silva read by Phil Gigante

In between rolling translations of Anglo-Saxon chronicles, poems, histories, M.C.D. Drout hawks 566 years of kings, pirates, popes, monks, wars, buildings and battles. But most and first of all, he hooks us with language, giving us bits of Anglo-Saxon poems, lists of Old English words (some, siton,The Anglo Saxon World by M.C.D. Drout

At St. Alban's Church there is a stained glass window picturing a Roman soldier with a halo dressed as a Priest. The Roman soldier was Alban. When the Priest who converted him was sentenced to death, Alban switched clothes with him and died in his place. A soldier disguised as aAll Mortal Flesh by Julia Spencer-Fleming read by Suzanne Toren

Jake is the kind of guy that tells his girlfriend to stop using some pheromonal perfume by Clinique because it "messes with his head". But apart from perfume, he is singularly unfussed. He is streetwise, he is attentive, and he belongs inside his own body. But he belongs nowherePower Play by Joseph Finder read by Dennis Boutsikaris

In some possible Doris Day movie about a perky blonde secretary and a rich executive bachelor there is a perpetual secretarial pool typing out Nora Roberts novels in time to Sinatra or Liszt. There is no Nora Roberts. There is a pool of Nora Roberts, a herd of Nora Roberts,The Nora Roberts Pool

The voice is everything. Instead of the typical pomposity of a haughty OBE accent, spouting that mixture of bad faith, betrayal, and malice so characteristic of the displaced British upper class, we have a whisper, a tempered, middle brow tone telling a tale about a slightly fat slightly alcoholic NottinghamROUGH TREATMENT by JOHN HARVEY::JOHN WILKINSON

And it occurred to him that the most important thing about Rode was that he had no friends. Smiley was reminded of Buchner's fairy tale about the child left alone on the Earth, who  finding no one to talk to  went to the moon because it smiled atA Murder of Quality by John Le Carre read by Keith Lloyd

The lines are drawn quickly - boom boom boom. Here is Israel, here is Russia, here is history. Here is crime, here is terror. Here stands Gabriel Allon: here, on the side of art. And Ivan stands here on the side of death. Like a Tarot layout. There is a bird's Moscow Rules by Daniel Silva

  Published by Random House. Pub Date p2003. Cutesy 70's Lois Lane tells odd, offbeat, seriously funny story of buddy-comedians (Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis? Bob Hope and Bing Crosby?) bound by repressed hostility (Freud) and girlicide. ". . .the world is divided up into four different types WHERE THE TRUTH LIES by Rupert Holmes. Read by Anna Gosteyer and Michael McEan.

Has anyone else noticed a spectacular and embarrassing  silliness among the old guard of East Coast scribblers? As though they were trying to write comic books, and couldn't figure out how to convert text into images? Gone are the wry, dry, street talk, the inside cracks of persons, cities, institutions.Capture by Robert Tanenbaum read by Charles Leggett