PMS Outlaws::Sharyn McCrumb read by Barbara Rosenblat

A very clever book, horribly named.
Holly the perky divorced real estate agent shows Bill a very very big house after Bill’s partner tells him to buy Tara for their new law office. “Think what this house says about the people who live here….!” she says.

It says that they have spent a lot of money on a really big house and now they will spend even more money to keep it from falling slowly to bits. It says that they probably want to brag about owning the house to a lot of people they don’t like very much, so that those people will envy them and feel bad that their own houses are not so grand. This house could generate a lot of bad feelings…

Meanwhile, Bill’s newly widowed and melancholic sister, Elizabeth, has checked herself into a mental asylum, where she meets Emma O., who explains that she’s inside for the same reason that most women are: “I’m in here for not being beautiful.”

When you get right down to it there is only one universal currency, says Emma.
And that is?
Beauty. Beauty is the one status symbol that cannot be taken away. If you’re beautiful you can be set down anywhere in the world without your ID or your credit cards and people will treat you well… Anyhow, pretty people matter. The rest of us don’t.

Elizabeth thinks that Emma O would probably be a lot more useful to therapists outside the institution, drumming up business by making homely women even more depressed….

Judge and Jury::James Patterson::Joe Mantegna

One of the good Patterson & Gross collaborations, with a new villain called “the Israeli” and another called “the electrician”. The descriptions of Haifa and Patagonia could have been cut out of Wiki. Joe Mantegna does adorable Italian goombas, and respectable Chechnian, Russian and Middle Eastern hoods.

Seven discs should get you through check-in, security, gate wait, boarding, and a long crippling flight in the middle seat of a United jet. By the time you pick up your baggage you’ll forget what the hero’s name is. As I did. Alors.

Rituals of the Season::Margaret Maron::CJ Critt

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 with a maxim or rule of etiquette, which sets up the story content. Manners, social customs, rituals, ceremonies, are something a bride needs to know before she becomes a member of the married class. They structure and organize her life, and yet they are not the same as law. It is interesting to discover such mores alongside the local law, interpreted and applied by Judge Knott as she prepares for her own 21st century wedding.

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Good Faith by Jane Smiley read by Richard Poe

At what point can one say that a man is a cheat? When he buys a house from you, when he tells you how to avoid paying income tax, when you help him misrepresent himself, when he helps you find a woman you can marry, when he calls you his best friend? When he complains to you about his wife with the long red hair? When he tells you that everyone trusts you, likes doing business with you, and you could have more, much more? When you close down your business to help him turn an old farm into a classy residential community? When you’re a real estate agent, and it’s 1981?

Perhaps deception should be classified as a sexual crime, as a long form of seduction. Because this is what Good Faith maps out: the leisurely seduction of an average Joe, the leading astray, or leading aside, or leading apart of a country realtor (from the Latin s?ducti?, s?ducti?n-, from s?ductus, past participle of s?d?cere, to lead astray : s?-, apart; see s(w)e- in Indo-European roots + d?cere, to lead; see deuk- in Indo-European roots.)

It was June and summer was right on time.

This is the mood of a good seduction. Not so much an act or an agency as an atmosphere, an environment, a happy economic mix: inflation, undervalued property, optimism. Jane: a combination of older sister, receptionist and tease. Marcus: a persuasive, likeable, ex IRS agent. Joe: a small-town, laid back, bill-paying Christian. A well brought up boy who dusts and smiles at buyers, widows, bankers, and government clerks. Who seduces and is seduced.

The Nora Roberts Pool

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, a barn full of Nora Roberts….

And on the Nora Roberts farm, there is no plagiarism, no copyright, because there is no original.

Friends in High Places by Donna Leon::Anna Fields

Venice is an old small town of old small sins. The Venice, that is, of Commissario Guido Brunetti, who may want no more of life than to read Xenophon and wait for his wife to come home from the Rialto with soft shell crabs. It is a Venice of officials, of officialism, and of greed. For Venetians learned very early to acquire, and to hoard.

There are many different kinds of greed. Consider, for example, the beautiful, intellectual greed of Paola, Guido’s wife of more than 20 years, who for a period of more than a month deserted her husband and family…

…in order to systematically read her way through, at his count, eighteen sea novels dealing with the unending years of war between the British and the French.

Or the greed of the tourists who pack the Rialto.

Why do they go to Rialto? Don’t they have markets where they come from? Don’t they sell food?

And then there is the greed of an emotional, protected, inefficient, aging political system and the customary ways it has worked itself into the persons and personalities of a Venetian type.

Blood from a Stone by Donna Leon::David Colacci

It is not unusual to hear unflattering descriptions of Americans in the press, but when did Americans get so ugly in fiction? Consider a white haired couple who seem to be wearing each other’s clothes in Donna Leon’s Blood from a Stone:

The woman wore a flannel checked shirt and thick woolen slacks, while the man wore a pink V-necked sweater and white tennis shoes. Both apparently had had their hair cut by the same hand. One could not say that hers was longer, it was merely less short.

It is not merely that the Americans are not pretty. Not merely that they are overweight, asexual, loud and wear white shoes. Underneath all that brute unloveliness is their tastelessness, their undercivilized nature. As if they were taken out of the oven too soon.

What, all because of the white shoes?

No, no. Nevertheless, it might be time for Americans to take a hard look at their representations in popular fiction. Often these representations are shameful. Often they are insulting. And often, they are true.

Sandra Nichols Found Dead by George Higgins::George Guidall

When a lawyer and a cop reconstruct the life of a pretty, jolly slut they recover hundreds of small, dishonourable wrongs, shameful and unpretty. Sandra Nichols loved to fuck, and she liked men, and she married them. And then she left them, and started again.

Her children are a sad disarray of nervous and neurotic plaintiffs in Kyle v Wade, the wrongful death case they bring against Sandra’s last husband. Peter Wade, who wasn’t meant for Williams College, nor perhaps for this planet, would not stand trial for the murder of Sandra Nichols. Instead, Peter would be compelled to give these demented children all the money he will have had to give Sandra, if he’d divorced her, according to the prenuptual agreement he had signed. A pretty good hat trick for a criminal lawyer, newly versed in Chapter 229 section 2 of the Massachusetts Criminal Code and the 1972 Compensatory Wrongful Death Act.

Nevil Shute No Highway read by Robin Bailey

Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find
No highway more, no track, all being blind
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.
Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea
And planned the courses of all Stars that be, Adventure on,
more wonders are in Thee.
Adventure on, for from the littlest clue
Has come whatever worth man ever knew;
The next to lighten all men may be you….

— John Masefield

Shute must be removed from the dusty category of oddish optimistic English writers and reclassified among the chroniclers of all things mechanical, experimental, technical and the men who invent them, perfect them, and test them. Again and again Nevil Shute describes ugly, unpopular, classless, technical men who nonetheless make wonderful things that work. In a word: engineers. Developers. Hackers. Nerds. Shutists, all. A century of nerds, bricoleurs and tinkerers and hobbyists invented buggy applications, tracked each other’s patents, and played with each other’s toys, long before we came along.

Honey is exemplary. A scientist who devises noisy contraptions tearing themselves to bits in order to study stress. A theorist who hasn’t heard of hot water boilers or mops.
Such an insignificant little man is Honey that it is almost inconceivable that he should be right about big important matters – like when planes are likely to crash. It is likewise inconceivable that such a seriously ugly man in a bad suit can make himself loved by a beautiful actress and a beautiful stewardess in the same book. But he does.