Hollywood Station by Joseph Wambaugh > recordedbookreview.com

What happens to a hard cop in a hard city in an era below good and evil.

19 Years of Reviews

Sharpen your pencils, open your looseleaf, sit up, take notes. This is an impressive, intelligent, well researched white-paper-thriller about silly, soppy, environmental theories and the well-funded, well publicized, well-established bureaucracies which profit by circulating them. 'State of Fear' is the coinage of a 'Mental Ecologist' whose hysterical critique of a toxicState of Fear by Michael Crichton read by George Wilson

Imagine a Cobbled Court Quilt Shop. A Blue Bean Bakery. A For the Love of Lavender Herbal Boutique. Farms, handiwork, handicraft, prudent, helpful, hardware-toting neighbors, dainty small town gossip, happy volunteers, lavender soap: the fantasmatic drift of post-Madoff sub-urban female regret. What does a pretty pacified community look like whenThreading the Needle by Marie Bostwick read by Hilary Huber, Bernadette Dunne

Frank has the waves, which is why he doesn't need much of anything else. Nevertheless he has an ex-wife, a girlfriend, 4 jobs and a routine, about which he is frankly religious. He has the "Gentleman's Hour" which is when other guys who don't need to be at work at 9The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow

Within the first minute and 34 seconds you know you are going to understand this book because Denning quotes James Dyson: "Of the world's ten largest corporations by revenue, 9 make big, heavy things, like cars." This is easy to follow, sensible stuff - and just the kind of obviousness thatThe Bull Hunter by Dan Denning

Charming English tale about a newly divorced English mother with ungrateful children and a lying, wretched, smarmy ex-husband. She talks to her neighbor about renting her lovely old house, and finds a job selling pretty cottages for a land developer... Sweet tale about moving on.Moving On by Anna Jacobs read by Penelope Freeman

Lola is a puckish mostly happy 84 year old ex-motel keeper who works at a charity shop In Claire Australia .. She is much loved by her granddaughters whom she has mothered and marshalled like a general, and who drop in to complain about their husband their children and eachLola's Secret by Monica McInerney read by Catherine Milte

CJ Critt's sweet, well enunciated, sing song voice turns even a murder mystery into a fairy tale. Once upon a time, Judge Knott (pronounced Judge not!) found a book of manners, probably given to newly engaged 19th century women preparing for wedding, marriage and domestic life. Each chapter begins withRituals of the Season::Margaret Maron::CJ Critt

"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

The bored and boring life of a typically immoral English banker in the city of London in the 1960s.George Evans by A.F. Gillotti read by Philip Rose

Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears, it was a complete, complex split second symphony and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloyBad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child read by Dick Hill

Every hyphenated family is unhappy in its own way. And so the Wyatt-Yarmouth family is unhappy not only because its son has died in a small town in British Columbia where a sweet, incompetent, merry constable is trying to keep the peace. There is also a venomousWinter of Secrets by Vicki Delany read by Carrington MacDuffie

Imagine a big black woman, Myrna from Montreal, who decides to drive South, but feels peckish after an hour and a half and so stops and bumps into a one-vache town, a fairy-tale town: Three Pines had what she craved. It had croissants and cafe au lait. It had steak fritesA Fatal Grace by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

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

A Bruegellian world of busy little people working very hard and magical children repeating absolutely useless gestures: marvellous Maeve Binchy. Eddie's dressmaker mother is surrounded by patterns and perpetually draped in some nearly finished garment as she sews and listens to the radio. "Let's just agree that he didn't keepThe Copper Beech by Maeve Binchy read by Barbara Caruso

In a small town in bourgeois Massachusetts, the wife of an NSA agent is killed by a car bomb as she starts up her husband's car. It seems obvious that the bomb was directed at the husband, but Jennifer, the twin of the dead wife, is not so sure. SheDeadly Codes by JP O'Donnell