The Rag and Bone Trade by Robert Cormier

Ethically demented, seriously ambitious police detective brutalizes innocent, unthinking little boy. Heartwrenching. A must for prosecutors.

19 Years of Reviews

A divorced, unemployed home organizer with a drug-addict son is hired to empty out the hoarded contents of an aging artist. Uncluttering the house is accompanied by a series of decisions about why and why not something is or is not valuable. An interesting and entertaining study of people andObjects of My Affection by Jill Smolinski read by Xe Sands

"You know how Thais are: totally fair minded Buddhists until their personal income is threatened." For we farang, the improbability of Thailand is as good as fiction. Where else would one find a dejected pot-smoking homicide detective and his long-haired assistant, a "Kathoey transsexual who has not yet scraped together theThe Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett read by Stephen Hogan

An acoustical hog. There is no one as good as Griffin on the hearts and minds of the Military, and no one as bad as the histrionic, oversyncopated, overamplifed, over-the-top Dick Hill reading him. A pity. Where is the outstanding Michael Russotto? By Order of the President by W.E.B. Griffin misread by Dick Hill

A decorator who wants to sell antiques on Long Island finds a dead body will doing an inventory for a wealthy woman. Not really about decorating and not really a mystery. Better Homes & Corpses by Kathleen Bridge read by Vanessa Daniels

As tempting and tasty as yellow cake are these novels about single but not terribly singular women, suddenly alone or suddenly in trouble or suddenly displaced. If they had worked they become domestic, if they had had money they no longer do, if they had been married, they are divorced,Nosy Neighbor by Fern Michaels read by Andrea Gallo

Let's just say that murders happened in the middle of other things: a cop, a lawyer, a fire investigator get up, they fight with their wives, they eat. Sometimes they think. The law is something they think about. How it came to be what it is, where it came from,ORIGIN & CAUSE by Shelly Reuben

It is wrong to suppose that language is about communication. James Hall does not communicate. He sniffs a piece of the invisible, picks it up with his mouth and lays it on our doorstep. What we call language is sometimes a body, sometimes a carcass, sometimes a feather, sometimes aFrank Muller reads James Hall:: Red Sky at Night

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

An insider's view of the pentagon: Three of the four military services have their headquarters within these walls... The underlying idea is that proximity will force the services to work together in neighborly harmony. And it would seem to make sense because after allMan in the Middle by Brian Haig read by L.J. Ganser

5. Be careful with puns, innuendo and double meanings. Search engines, spiders and robots have no sense of humor. Keep this in mind when trying to attract their attention. So states SEO "tip" number 5 of Berkshire Hathaway's BusinessWire.com, a neat new on-line press release engine, as clean as Google'sFor whom?

Autumn in the Vineyard by Marina Adair There's always a girl. She's either poor, or she's lost all her money; she's either alone, or she's been disowned; she's either socially incompetent, or she's incited by her own humiliation. This time, it's Frankie Baudouin and she wants to grow grapesAutumn in the Vineyard by Marina Adair narrated by Renee Raudman

In a small town in bourgeois Massachusetts, the wife of an NSA agent is killed by a car bomb as she starts up her husband's car. It seems obvious that the bomb was directed at the husband, but Jennifer, the twin of the dead wife, is not so sure. SheDeadly Codes by JP O'Donnell

Imagine yourself in every drawing room of mature Washingtonian society, amidst the pouffy hair, the polka dot dresses, the over-used jokes, and the starchy defensive hawkishishness of 1973. The wives, too, are overused. Pat Nixon is brittle; Dorothy, wife of the ex CIA agent and Watergate burgler E. Howard Hunt,Watergate by Thomas Mallon read by Joe Barrett

A girl detective who can speak a thousand languages, with her own personal Saint, New York City's District Attorney as her father, and an ex Viet-Cong guerrilla as a nanny -- only Robert Tanenbaum (and the City itself) could conjure up the sad, inscrutable Lucy Karp. As always when weRobert Tanenbaum Malice read by Mel Foster

A nice little vignette of malicious 1990's life with its Coke, its Sexual Saturation & its top of the mornin' Fuck You Very Much Sadism. P.I. ex-con Harding is hired to track and video rich respected Plastic Surgeon & wife-beater in the course of perverse sexual scenes. Erotic, staccato descriptions of girls tied up,This Far No Further by John Wessel read by Richard Ferrone