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

Women are divisive. Among themselves and between their generations. Go to any academic women's conference and see for yourself. Or listen to Blair Brown's crisp, young, feminine voice reading The Senator's Wife. And listen for this divisiveness. In the pasteurized neighborly conversations of Miller's two women: the 37 year oldThe Senator's Wife by Sue Miller read by Blair Brown

Read this series by Jan Karon about a diabetic Episcopalian rector in a small town in North Carolina whose fat happy female parishioners cant stop baking him pies cakes and cookies. Very very funny scenes with neglected husbands eating unthawed church sale cakes the minute their wives aren't looking, aJan Karon: The Mitford Series

When a computer salesman comes home she greets him with a smile which denies the need to talk about the bill, all the bills, for things he wants to deny her. Later, in the bath, she shoots him. His name is Dennis Poole. He is the kind of man whoNightlife by Thomas Perry read by Shelley Frasier

In the yard a piece of shiny scrap metal from a nuclear power plant is waiting for Roy to see it. But Roy is reading a not yet published New York Times obituary: Roy Valois a sculptor whose large works are displayed in many public spaces aroundNerve Damage by Peter Abrahams read by Alan Nebelthau

What starts up as an Insider's Guide to storage in L.A. develops into a diary by Holden Caulfield's bitch-sister, grown up into another alienated and out of joint L.A. wife. Judith was a thoroughly unpleasant daughter with a borderline personality disorder of a father who grew tomatoes in NebraskaTo Be Sung Underwater by Tom McNeal narrated by Susan Boyce

At the end of this very long book, a famous publisher asks an ex-novelist to write about Wall Street during the subprime fiasco. But the novelist can only write about the novelist. No characters, no plot, no events ever get beyond the "me" of this word dealer. Annoying, pizzicato readingDear Money by M. McPhee read by Kate Reading.

A wagonful of new Agatha Christie audiobooks ("lesser" works?) shows us an Agatha knee-deep in Freud, perhaps, indeed, an "English Freud". Here she experiments with the entire merde ridden hagiography of psychoanalytic terms: pathologies, neuroses, perversions, deviances, persecutions. Sarah has just finished her M.B. andAgatha Christie, differently

Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me hard boils the story from the start: London as the small bad city with its own 87th precinct: Brant, who cuts a bit off the top of every drug bust, makes himself loved by women, plays laid back surfer dude copCalibre by Ken Bruen read by Gerard Doyle

Lisa Gardner is a genius at thesis statements. My favorite is: "a family is a system" (Hide). Or maybe: "A computer is a portal, you know, an entry point into your home." (The Neighbor) This book's thesis statement is: "Pain has a flavor." And like all good thesis statements, it tellsLisa Gardner, Touch & Go

Once upon a time, in a movie made long ago, there was a beautiful fairy who helped a poor little girl. You do not remember the movie. You remember the voice. It is the voice of Mary Peiffer. This time the movie is not about a little girl. It is inMary Peiffer reading Sue Henry

Like Grace in Warren Adler's Mourning Glory, Fleur seduces very wealthy widowers at funerals. Fashionable, flamboyant and sexually gifted, she moves in to Richard Favour's estate, charms his family, and plays out her usual scam. First, she borrows an American Express Platinum Card which draws on the widower's bank account,The Gatecrasher by Madeleine Wickham read by Katherine Kellgren

As the eighties crash down around him in images of newly divorced women and unusably long nails, Macon emerges as a peculiar species of American male bent on reorganizing the world. Author of guidebooks for businessmen who hate to travel, Macon Leary writes about the latest KFC openingThe Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler::George Guidall

A widowed ex-schoolteacher who makes beautiful beaded jewelry and travels from craft show to craft show returns home to find a dead man in her kitchen. The local detective assigned to the case is a dog: he botches up the initial investigation and Lillianne's house is totally trashed, searchedBeaded to Death by Janis Patterson read by Gayle Hendrix

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

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 mysteriesLong Time No See:: Re-hearing Susan Isaacs read by Cristine Mcmurdo-Wallis