The Second Chance Cafe Archives > recordedbookreview.com

Hope Springs: A foster child lovingly raised in an old Victorian house comes back, buys the old house, and opens up a Bakery Cafe where she can sell her special brownies.

19 Years of Reviews

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

Nevil Shute's America: Beyond the Black Stump How do we know what we look like to others? They tell us, that's how. When Stan, sober geologist, good son and citizen of Hazel, Oregon, tells Molly that he or maybe his friend got a girl pregnant, and that the twelve year oldNevil Shutes America: Beyond the Black Stump

Couples. Kellerman's shrink narrator is full of meticulous, obsessive, data-driven characterizations of L.A. couples and couplings. Milos and Rick, for instance. Rick gets his hair trimmed every two weeks at a high priced West Hollywood salon. Milos drives every two months to La Brea and Washington where he hands hisKellerman's Gone

Gwenda gets off the boat at Plymouth, hires a car, looks for village to live in. And finds one: a perfectly charming cottage with aga, a kitchen garden and flowered wallpaper. Gwenda moves in with her rosewood, her mahogany, her papermache, her chintz and all the fabrics ofSleeping Murder by Agatha Christie read by Rosemary Leach

It is not enough to attach 5 generations of women to a tree or a patch of trees to give them character. Yes, one is very old, and one is a felon, and one was a stewardess, and one slept with a dozen different men each time she wanted toThe Roots of the Olive Tree by Courtney Miller read by Karen White

Warped, lusty, utterly female voice of this slut-goddess kicks you in the groin, cuffs you to the radiator, and feeds you sex and ham sandwiches. "You belong to me, D-o-l-l" she says to Steve Carella. And you do. Or want to. As does Steve Carella, detective and good guy ofDOLL by Ed McBain (Pouty D, drag the O, tongue heavy on the L.)

Painfully resonant, funny, wise: legacy. Whose legacy?: the immigrant's, the jew's, the orphan's, the escape artist's. Brilliantly performed by Christopher Lane with all the accents right: Bronx, Harlem, Brooklyn, Westchester, Polish, German and of course Santa Barbaran.Moving Day by Jonathan Stone Performed (!) by Christopher Lane

A book for a long inside day waiting for a hurricane or a war.... about a man wired by a dream not necessarily of being a cop but of being the good guy in the uniform, a hacker-ette, and a dog..... and about dainty compassionate dinner hour executions by Roy, your average, everyday,Rivers of the Heart by Dean Koontz read by

Maeve Binchy is the grand-mistress of the domestic imaginary: that hearty, busy, pretty space where women make themselves primal. It is late Capitalism and the lumpen proletariat of Dublin are caterers, not cooks. Katy is prole and caterer and the figure of a Dublin that caters to others, toScarlet Feather by Maeve Binchy read by Barbara Caruso

The Louboutin-loving print reporter makes us want to read her. She writes well because she knows how to talk well to......everyone in Richmond, Virginia. And seems to fit in everywhere, despite the heels. Lyndee Walker tells us that "she has always wanted to be Lois Lane..." and gives us aFront Page Fatality by Lyndee Walker

Not all old women from the South are funny. Only the ones who know what they don't want, and what they want: All I want in this life is a reasonable man who's self supporting, who's nice to me, funny, you know, likes straight sex, not role playing modelled onThe Land of Mango Sunsets by Dorothea Benton Frank read by Nanette Savard

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

Imagine overhearing the comments of secretaries, girlfriends, GS-11s, GS-18s, CIA heads of station, assistants to CIA heads of station, busty, born-again Texan society matrons, outrageously charming right-wing politicians with more friends than God, superstitious immigrants and sons of immigrants, Muj(ahadeen) terrorists, Afghani torturers, Pakistani tyrants, Egyptian defenseCharlie Wilson's War by George Crile read by Christopher Lane

For years the facile, monarch-note like introductory blurbs of audiobooks have been aimed at delayed airline passengers looking forward to a two or three hour seat in a jet on hot tarmac. As nonlocalizably uninformative as the pilot, but more or less referential. The introduction to Robin Cook's CriticalCritical by Robin Cook read by George Guidall

A serious Swede, heir of a prestigious Accounting firm, talks to his tour bus driver who must, like him, return to an unwanted fate, a little farm waiting for him to take it over: "I'm no good at going out looking for sheep that have got stuck on their backA Week in Winter by Maeve Binchy read by Rosalyn Landor

Tag: The Second Chance Cafe

The Second Chance Cafe by Alison Kent read by Natalie Ross