Who in God’s name could murder a woman who puts doilies on the bottom of guest-room wastepaper baskets? In this decade of the Mother, of Mommihood, of stretchy, skin tight maternity dresses, of preternaturally calm Nannies, Long Time No See is perhaps the precursor of a series of mysteries dedicated to killable mothers.
Category: Clever
New! Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.
Death Match is the Beta version of Google Dating Search. Consider it:a small exclusive matchmaking service run by a brilliant lonely Geek charges 25,000 dollars per search. It mixes men, women and algorithms. It finds: perfect couples.
The metallic, mechanical voice of Barrett Whitener engineers the sounds of Miss Google. She’s the demented computer in the kitchen, the thing that produces the results. Eliza. And yes, like all things female, one day Miss Google goes nuts.
That’s when Southern, fay, tangy, overintelligent ex-FBI forensic psychologist Christopher Lasch is hired. To investigate the suicides. Of the men, the women, the perfect matches.
And shows us that jealousy is present in all human products, even search engines.
Linda Fairstein Death Dance read by Barbara Rosenblat
Ghoul: An evil spirit or demon in Muslim folklore believed to plunder graves and feed on corpses.
There is a ghoulish, golemic, East European element that surfaces in the life of every dishy Jewish blonde A.D.A. in NYC. A specific perversion, a senselessness knocks at her door just before it becomes evil, or criminal, or comic.
She is buried alive in the Botanical Gardens by a paraphiliac with a love of Poe. She is held captive in the Metropolitan Opera while a stage hand fingers her inner thigh. She opens a letter which bursts into flames and spoils her hairdo.
Indeed, one of the most lovable qualities of Alex(andra) Cooper, daughter and heir of a man who invented a widget, is the way the forces of weirdness tag at her heels.
For example. She talks to a Turkish intern who likes to rape unconscious women while Mike and Mercer try to trace his number. They can’t. Alex groans: “How come this works on T.V. and in the movies but when I need it the system fails?”
Well, blondie, because the 212 area code is not from the Upper West Side but from Ankara, Turkey … It’s not incompetence. It’s not idiocy. It’s something else.
Jennifer Crusie read by Aasne Vigesaa: Faking It
“Poker was second only to pool in Michael Dempsey’s skills his children should have.”
How can you not lose your shirt to the writer of such a genealogy?
This is Crusie as good as she was inTemptation read by the unrememberable, unpronouncable name who does Marilyn Monroe better than MM, and twirls the whole narration into a Macy Grey song.
Rogues: children of rogues, Tilda and Dempsey are lying in bed and Dempsey is trying to sink a pocket into Tilda and Tilda is explaining that she has a long term relationship with an appliance and besides, she has a headache. He tells her that this is the first time he’s heard the line spoken in real life….She stipulates:
“Hey do you pay any attention to me at all…?
“I paid attention to you last night.”
“To what you were doing. Not to me!”
“You were what I was doing.”
“It’s not like you talked to me. It’s not like you made eye contact.”
“Hey, my mouth was full. And my head was between your thighs. You want eye contact you gonna have to lean down….”
And then, a minute later:
“…How about a threesome: you, me, and the machine?”
Crusie is very very smart, very very funny, and so much more competent as a writer than the zoo of typists generating chick-lit that one finds oneself thinking: English Literature.
Lisa Scottoline read by Kate Burton:: Mary goes to Missoula
Bennie’s office of girls has moved uptown, and become a good hair office. The Good Italian Catholic girl and the Giant California Blonde combine glib girly gall with smart search skills to reconstruct, redress and prosecute a 60 year old wrong.
Mary (GIC-girl) is obsessed with an old case about an old immigrant and sets off for Wyoming because someone doesn’t want her to.
Judy who climbs mountains for fun (Mary once saw a photo of Judy’s family and thought they worked for Comcast Cable….) encourages her:
“Do you even know where Wyoming is?
“Sure, somewhere on the left.”
“Do you know what an antelope looks like?
“Sure, a dog with horns.”
South Philly accent well done by Kate Burton, who makes Mary sound smart and gullible, smart and nutty, smart and frilly. Lovable combinations. Law and fiction, fiction and law.
Martha Grimes read by Tim Curry: The Old Silent
Short cuts to well told endings of British crime novels don’t usually work. They leave out the localized, linguistic pulp of English thought. And it is thought not plot that makes a novel so very relentlessly English.
Tim Curry’s reading resonates with localized, idiomatic, parochial, inherited sense, regionality, territoriality.
Listen up. Tim Curry turns this abridgement into an exception.
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
It is the story of a happy Captain of a sinking ship. It is the story of Chernobyl, afterwards. It is the story of provisional investigators, provisional policemen, provisional scientists who are provisionally accepted as the mad inhabitants of a zone officially uninhabited, in which no crime officially occurs. The mood is of a cocktail party on an asteroid hurtling toward earth. There we find Arkady, sullen, stubborn, singular, biting at radioactive pickles (“Crisp, tasty, and with a touch of strontium”) and asking questions.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carre read by FRANK MULLER. An Original.
How did Muller know that the text could sound like this? How could he make words talk like this? And yet he does. Muller turns them up and over and around so that each one cries out: Me, look! Listen to me! Hear me. And having been read in such a way, by such a voice, a word, a text, remains unspeakable by any other voice.
One listens half-crouched, head tilted, just a little, toward the machine, the voice, because it is inconceivable or almost inconceivable that this is English. For how can one even open one’s mouth when there is someone who makes English like this, makes English sound like this….
False Memory by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang
If you’re going to murder somebody, ten to one there’s an old Cheez Doodle underneath the front seat of your car. Which is why Cheez Doodles have become some of the very best indicators of feloniousness among otherwise reasonable novelists like Dean Koonz, Jim Hall and Harlan Coben.
Think of the genetic misfit in Mr. Murder; the ex-mafia garrotist in Mean High Tide or the usurist’s thugs in Chinaman’s Chance. It’s not enough to be a psychopath, youve got to be a psychopath with a neurosis, a psychopath with a sweet-tooth, or a psychopath with a hard on for Frito-Lay.
Too often, the eating habits of terminally guided goons have taken a back seat to other seemingly more exciting personality traits…Narcissism, for example.
Consider the thoughts of the once beautiful assassin with the dreadful
new face in The Marching Season as the girls in the street, the waitresses, the laundrette,
stop looking at him, stop flirting with him, stop liking him. Tragic? No;
ugliness is just points to a misguided gene pool, a fucked up son, a joke
against a father.
DOLL by Ed McBain read by
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 with beautiful women who are not his wife.
“You belong to me, D-o-l-l” she says to Steve Carella. And you do. Or want to. As does Steve Carella, detective and good guy of the 87th precinct.
Because this dom, this pungent and powerful crook, and girlfriend of crook, tortures him,
addicts him to heroine and milks him for information. Incredible unequalled performance by a doll.