Alone. Another Abridged Morality Play by Lisa Gardner

Sometimes one wonders whether books get written by stringing together the top keywords in Google. Sex-cops-beautiful wife-abused child-murder-guns-rich family-domestic violence-sharpshooter-alcoholic father-politics-doctors-baseball. (Never forget baseball.) Calculate the page rank, and you get: Good cop gets bad girl. Bad girl has good excuse. Good cop has bad night. Recalculate. Not a best seller yet? Add: bad mother-money-child abuse- sex-psychopath-incest-genetic disease-criminal investigator-kidnapping. (Don’t forget kidnapping). Here you go: Cop with alcoholic father shoots rich husband with gun and fucks wily wife-whore whose impossibly sick child plays baseball. Recalculate. Bestseller. Ho, hum.
Posted on Mar 22, 05 | 10:32 am |

19 Years of Reviews

Grace, who practices psychiatry on Manhattan Island, relays a story about one of her patients to the interviewer from Vogue: At a very early point in their relationship, before they were married, her husband told her that she had ugly feet. She accepted this, and having accepted this one instance ofYou Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz read by Christina Delaine

Another case for Molly (Moonshine) Smith, Trafalgar constable, blonde, widow and skier. When Cathy Lindsay, housewife and teacher is shot in the back while walking her dog Spot, the town can't figure it out. We are introduced to the dead woman's fat unfaithful husband, her delinquent son, her gossipy colleagues, but mostlyA Cold White Sun by Vicki Delany read by Carrington Macduffie

Despite the silly title that announces the 'coziness' of this mystery and tags it as irreal, uncruel and bloodless, there is some 'spur' to this tale. Not enough to kick into a plot, but some. First, there are characters: a dead cryptographer father, a glassblower-daughter, a local kid with Aspergers, aPane and Suffering by Cheryl Hollon read by C.S.E. Cooney

The last of the Rabbi Small series narrated with an annoying over-aggressive punkishness by Guidall -- to intimate, perhaps, the intellectual aggression of Rabbi Small, the clever not-to-be socialized puzzle solver and prayer leader of the Conservative Jews of Barnard's Crossing Massachusetts. The characters are at least as aliveThe Day the Rabbi Resigned by Harry Kemelman read by George Guidall

A house too old, with too many rooms and too many academics -- all the elements of a ghost story, without a ghost. Summer dissolves into eating, gardening, coupling, and conjecture: who is in the house?Someone in the House by Barbara Michaels read by Barbara Rosenblat

We get information in clumps, tangles, bunches. There are facts, mixed up with opinions, references, foreign words, sounds and descriptions referring to where we are talking, what is going on where we are talking, the distraction-ridden machinery of a technologically frenzied environment, analogies dragged in from confused personal archives,Fiddlers by Ed McBain read by Charles Stransky

Rina Lazarus is a religious woman who cleans the ritual bath, cooks huge Sabbath meals, and teaches Math at a Yeshiva for boys in "Jewtown", near L.A. She dresses modestly, covers her hair with a kerchief or a wig, and celebrates the Sabbath by hosting huge home cooked meals forThe Ritual Bath by Faye Kellerman performed by Mitchell Greenberg

Mary and Neil are cousins: sort of, by adoption. They were once, possibly, in love. Neil has returned to Mason, Ohio where he is related to just about everybody, for a summer. He is helping an Aunt turn an oyster of a house into a bed and breakfast. Mary is marriedThings We Once Held Dear by Ann Tatlock

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 serious Swede, heir of a prestigious Accounting firm, talks to his tour bus driver who must, like him, return to an unwanted fate, a little farm waiting for him to take it over: "I'm no good at going out looking for sheep that have got stuck on their backA Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy read by Rosalyn Landor

According to Cheney and the gang, some torturers are more equal than others. This is the story of how one American becomes unequal. How an average guy, born of poor fishing folks of poor Maine stock, becomes a torturer. How a guy who knew boats, and joined the Marines, and learnedThe Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci

Imagine Frank Muller doing CZ Sakall, the jowly, bespectacled, hysterical Hungarian who cannot stop wiping his spectacles, shaking his head and concocting scenarios of doom ... "today... its going to happen today..." etc. The stammering, anxious NYC diamond dealer calls Jimmy McShane, well heeled ex-cop and private dick, who bodyguardsTHE GAME OF THIRTY by WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE ::FRANK MULLER:

A catholic tailor used his life savings to go to the Vatican. When he returned his parish gathered to find out what he had seen. "What kind of a fellow is the Pope?" they asked him. "44 Medium," he said. This is the kind of obsession Buffet is lookingWarren Buffet's Management Secrets by Mary Buffett & David Clark. Performed by Mary Buffett.

Jackson slugs a bully and saves a small dog. Hence Jackson, ex military man, ex husband (twice), having been familiar with violence his whole life has now finally found a good use for it. Now on the other side of the law, but otherwise non-localizable: "when heStarted Early Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson read by Graeme Malcolm

Do you really want to spend a half an hour of your time listening to a blow by blow account of how Diane, an Elm Creek Quilter, who never remembers to charge her cell phone, gets stuck in a snow storm with only 8% of her battery left to make...A Quilter's Holiday by Jennifer Chiaverini read by Christina Moore