A Stranger In Town by Cheryl Bradshaw read by Crystal Sershin

Private eye with basic grammar skills looks for two kidnapped girls in small town, and gets cozy with the Sheriff’s son.

19 Years of Reviews

Clean, streamlined writing by STEPHEN COONTS; as always, wonderful technical-mechanical details of navy pilots planes and carriers; wry, politically prickly story about NAVY officer-dom, post-war bureaucracy, and the flow of military power-money.The Minotaur by Stephen Coonts read by Michael Prichard

A bouquet of accidents pop up at the beginning of the story: a cab crash in Manhattan, a car crash in Darien, Connecticut, an overdose in Mitford...For the rest of this story, the notion of accident is under erasure. What after all is an accident? Is the housing crisis anThe Accident by Linwood Barclay read by Peter Berkrot

Food, sex, and Rome. Delicious words string together bodies of edible women and edible animals and recipes of both until it seems uncivilized to separate eating and coupling.The Food of Love::Anthony Capella :: Rocco Sisto

This second in the "Allison Campbell Mystery" series is disappointing. It would have been nice to come back to a different kind of detecting woman -- a woman whose job it is to detect -- and re-configure -- a social image. The image of a person is of course aDeadly Assets by Wendy Tyson read by Tanya Eby

The open-faced innocence of Anna Field's voice offers up a ripe acoustical image of a woman artist in New York: Faith Crowl. Faith is commissioned by an old and wealthy New York City socialite to paint the ballroom of her storied mansion in trompe l'oeil. Faith accepts, reluctantly, afterTrick of the Eye by Jane Stanton Hitchcock read by Anna Fields

Another New York City nanny? No, no. This one wakes up screaming every morning, unable to stop the dream of a body bag around a not yet dead body. This one is having an affair with the father of the children she is nannying. This one sees cockroachesYou’ve Been Warned by James Patterson & Howard Roughan Read by Ilyana Kadushin

Yes it is well written. Yes, it reels you in and captivates you, and the dialogue is peppy enough to make you grin. But. All Hemingway needed to write was: Who was she? for Bacall to deliver the message that Bogie was being a dick, and she wasn't having any,Not Hemingway. Sea Glass Sunrise by Donna Kauffman read by Amanda Ronconi

Arkady, the permanently grim, dejected, despondent Moscow cop wants another autopsy done on the body of a prostitute and finds his old friend Willie at the morgue, having moved in. Immense and unshaven, Willie Pezenko shuffled around the morgue like a wooly mammoth in an operating gown. A cigarette hungThree Stations by Martin Cruz read by Ron McClarty

Two mothers. Iris, mother of the bride, is pushy, ambitious, Jewish, overpresent, and proud of her Red Hook genealogy, which can be traced back to the Battle of the Bulge. But Iris is not exactly a local. Yes, every summer Iris comes back to the oceanfront Queen Anne house,Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman read by Kimberly Farr

Gamash celebrates his marriage at a bed and breakfast with beds so high you need a little step stool to climb into them and bumps into a family murder. The Cruelest Month by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

A few Jewish words referring to a few ritual baked goods eaten by a few Jews does not a Jewish novel make. Nor does a description of a modestly clad woman with her hair tied back by a long scarf. If the Peter Decker novels wielded some specific charm byBlindman's Bluff by Faye Kellerman read by Mitch Greenburg

Again, we have Washington with its burials and its laudations betrayals become elegy -- where the ones praising the dead are also their executioners. A Roman tradition carried brightly on by moral gamesmen, whose empires are supported by three rhetorical questions: Is it ethical for men in power, men entrusted byA House Divided by Mike Lawson read by Joe Barrett

Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shalt not curse it. That includes the rain. No matter what might pour down, no matter how heavy the cloudburst or how icy the sleet, you should never ever utter profanities against whatever the heavens have in store for us. Everybody knowsThe Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak read by Laurel Merlington

A dirge so distant from the whiny unpleasantness of the latest slag of female fiction, it might as well be written by a different sex... a mother sex, a sister sex, a mourning sex, an Irish sex.The Gathering by Anna Enright read by Fiona Shaw

There is something annoying, something unsettling, something demoralizing about a story in which all the women are either murder victims, embittered but useless mothers, faithful, ineffectual wives, or sexually charged students with dancers' bodies. Annoying, too, is witnessing an entire small town turn against an innocent man and his brainyThe Bone House by Brian Freeman read by Joe Barrett