Peter Robinson Archives > recordedbookreview.com

There should be and will be a measure of a good writer, which is the number of words it takes for the reader to be INSIDE the story. Up, up and away. Peter Robinson: 10. Kristin Hannah/Hannah Kristin: 25. Ernest Hemingway: 4.

19 Years of Reviews

Ex-police chief and widow returns to her home town to help her daughter recover from a divorce and gets messily involved in a murder. Mildly uninteresting.The Fine Art of Murder by Emily Barnes read by Carrington MacDuffie

Everything good comes together in this slow moving L.A. smoothie with the wizened, reflective, and much humbled Harry Bosch. Gone is the bull in the china shop attitude, the stubborn in your face overconfidence. In its place is the humility that comes from being too old or at least olderThe Overlook by Michael Connelly read by Len Cariou

A house too old, with too many rooms and too many academics -- all the elements of a ghost story, without a ghost. Summer dissolves into eating, gardening, coupling, and conjecture: who is in the house?Someone in the House by Barbara Michaels read by Barbara Rosenblat

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

Forget the tax on sugar. Tax bad dialogue, dreadful characterizations, idiotic psychological profiles. To wit: When he was a child the twitch had made him the target of merciless teasing and bullying. It had made him burn with hatred. And that hatred had driven him to succeed. Victor Orlov wanted toThe Defector by Daniel Silva read by Phil Gigante

Private eye with basic grammar skills looks for two kidnapped girls in small town, and gets cozy with the Sheriff's son.A Stranger In Town by Cheryl Bradshaw read by Crystal Sershin

I am reading three books, disrespectfully, carelessly, unthinkingly. After finishing The Girl Who Kicked A Hornet's Nest I decided that there was nothing more to read. Nothing else to read. Nothing to satisfy the specific hunger for more Girl. Nothing to rejoin the amorous journalist and the girl. WhatDoomed.

Before Patricia Cornwell, before CSI, did anybody read dead bodies or examine them for traces of their killer? Yes, as it happens. Where there are bodies, there are secrets and where there are secrets, there are readers. Gaudinus the African, for example, who remembers people only by diseases, andThe Mistress of the Art of the Dead by Ariana Franklin read by Roslyn Landor

A big man, a private eye, ex-military, school of Afghanistan, minus one leg and one girlfriend, hires a relentlessly normal secretary for a week. She stays on. He gets a case. She helps. Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith

Miss Sophie Long is a Catholic School teacher who can't parallel park, until she meets Lois, Vietnam Vet, trained sniper, mechanic, and lesbian. They live in the same neighborhood as Morgan, a size 16-18 police detective with a demented mother. At some point, to make ends meet, Sophie and LoisRetirement Plan by Martha Miller read by Bernadette Dunne

An English schoolboy's happy meal: a murder, a bit of Herodotus, a little masochism, a little colonialism, a shovelful of archaeology, a box of cheroots, a little petit bourgeois pettiness, a pretty but not too pretty girl who works with animals, a plain, uxurious police inspector, and a healthy dollopThe Lost Army of Cambysus by Paul Sussman read by Gordon Griffin

Aristotle says that there are three sexes: men, women, and short women. This book is about that third sex: short, married, murderous women with happy helpful husbands and perky breasts. The kind who play tennis in the morning and spend the afternoon decorating the guest bathroom. The kind who think that wife #3 meansLong Time No See by Susan Isaacs read by Cristine Mcmurdo-Wallis

As good as reading a short history of the rise and rise of the garden variety jihadist. A retired SAS agent is mending the roof of his medieval barn when he is summoned to a final counter-terrorist mission. The medieval political system also needs mending. So begins a storyThe Afghan::Frederick Forsyth read by Robert Powell

One reason to write books is that you can name your chapters — more than just One, Two. You can name a chapter “Visiting Nora at Nova Scotia Rest Hospital”. Out of nowhere appears a book about Jacob from Halifax who was born in the reading room of the Halifax FreeMy Darling Detective by Howard Norman

An unusual and captivating account of a Manhattan social scene rapt by cocaine, bondage, dying gays and too much money. Vince Cardozo as the NYPD detective lieutenant who is pretty enough and straight enough to correct wrongs and fall in love at the same time... Privileged Lives by Edward Stewart narrated by Christian Rummel

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The Measure