I feel proud

For the first time in a long while I feel proud - not because America elected it's first black President - although that's a good thing. It's because he respects ability and smarts and education. And because he's appointing people who are like that. The agenda seems to be to do the right thing without a social agenda. In a funny way, the economic crisis gives us a chance to rise above the partisan issues and focus on the big - shared - issues. I know it's still early, but I believe Obama is rising to the challenge with his appointments - talented, experienced people who inspire confidence here and in the rest of the world.

I'm a Republican. Not a "Reagan" Republican but a "Rockefeller" Republican. I believe in personal responsibility and personal liberty. But I also believe in shared responsibility, as an American, to help out where it's needed. I was thrilled in the 70's when the traditional liberal, special interest Democrats were swept out of office. Unfortunately, my whole voting life I seemed to be voting AGAINST something - liberals, actors, philanderers, christian conservatives.

Barack Obama was the first time in a long while that I voted for someone who I believed shared my goals and aspirations. John McCain was a huge disappointment to me. I know Obama will do things I disagree with, sometimes strongly. It would be impossible not to in this volatile time. But I believe he is truly trying to do the best for all without exploiting patisan divisions. He may not succeed, but at least he's trying. And the crisis may just be serious enough to give everyone a stake in his success. We all know it's time to do something about the Middle East, healthcare funding, the growing wealth gap and education - we just don't know what to do. But it's time we did something. At least we can move forward and learn from our mistakes. The economy will eventually improve and the war will end. These issues will remain.


Again, I feel proud. Not because Barack Obama is black but because he speaks intelligently and chooses smart, capable people to surround himself with.

Confessions of an I-Phone addict.

Confessions of an I-Phone addict.

Hello, my name is Paul and I have a problem.

I've always been prone to trying new things: I get a new computer almost every year, I download the newest versions of favorite applications as soon as they're available (I haven't missed a new version of Quicken in 20 years!) and have seldom had a cell phone for more then a year. I 've tried every new phone and feature as they become available. Invariably they're a disappointment. High speed 3G? There's nothing to download and it eats up your battery. I had a 3G Nokia and it was so bad that it would die overnight if it wasn't plugged in. The internet interface was so clunky it took a minute to load before you could start to download. Then if you got a phone call you lost everything on the browser.

Cell phones are not accidentally bad. They're designed that way by telecom carriers who are schizophrenic about control. They want to advertise cool features but are afraid of losing control and force them to work through their proprietary networks and interfaces. They're designed to work for the carrier not the user. The phones generally work well to make phone calls or get messages; but stink for everything else. The problem with that is you don't need a $500 telephone (which they would like to sell you) to make phone calls. Microsoft colludes with this strategy by making the "smart phone" software clunky and focused on Windows. Blackberry's do a good job in the important, but relatively narrow, realm of email but that's all.

Apple broke the mold by forcing ATT to accept a newly designed phone that would be elegant in design and focused on usability. Everything is big and bright and easy to understand. Apple decided to sacrifice FEATURES to focus on usability. When you look up a phone number on the built-in directory it knows where you are and automatically brings up a map to show you where the address is and asks you if you would like to dial the number. Afterwards it will give you directions to get there from where you are. When you're looking at the internet it automatically re-sizes the page to highlight whatever item you tap on. If the phone rings when you're browsing it lets you answer the phone without losing what you're working on. You can also browse the internet or look up a contact without disconnecting your caller. There's message on the screen reminding you to go back to the call. As great as the phone is, it was still pretty limited in it's uses. After a while, you really don't need to look up addresses all that often or check weather or stock prices.

About a month ago Apple did it again. They introduced the Applications Store that allows you to download I-Phone-specific applications directly on your phone. Within a month there were at least 2,000 applications for the phone - almost all of them free or a dollar; almost none over $10.00. Many of them are devoted to a very small dedicated audience or are really stupid - but some are so elegant and useful it's amazing.

Some of my favorites:

Now Playing - Knows every theater near where you are and what's playing there. You can go either from the theater to the movie to the showtime or from the movie to where it is playing. Includes reviews from two sources. You can array all the movies playing in the area by rating and then find where it's playing. It even has the movie details and trailers. ALL FOR FREE!

Shopping List Manager - One of Chris' favorites. Allows you to maintain multiple shopping lists (Otis and NY!). Includes a dictionary of standard items sorted by store sections that you can add to. It also allows you to email a shopping list to your husband's phone while he's in the store.

MLB At Bat - Has all the baseball games for a three day period. For games underway it shows you the box-score, who's on base and and the status of the at-bat by pitch. Also has video clips of highlights of ongoing games. It ties into MLB and has all the key statistics by team and player. This was expensive at $5. There's nothing free from MLB.

Bloomberg - A great financial site. It has Financial headlines and news stories; On-line market info including Stocks, Commodities, Bonds and Currencies; stock prices (delayed) including charts and summary info. A real powerhouse of financial info when we're travelling. It's also free.
Weather - Current weather and forecasts for a number of locations. Let's us keep track of Toronto (mother), San Francisco (Scott), NY, Otis and Paris. All the essentials. Also free.

Games -A whole slew of games for any taste. Most free or a dollar.

Does it sound like I'm hooked??? You bet. Chris complains that I would be in withdrawal without my phone--she's right! At a recent dinner in Toronto, three I-phone users enthusiastically shared their 'favorite' features! It quickly became clear we were all equally 'in love' with this new technology. Someone pointed out that right there at the table we had our own little 'i-phone' addiction support group! Not a bad idea.

Lawrence Block - Hit and Run

Not worth the time. Keller made an amusing short story, not a whole novel. Tedious, boring.

Book description

Keller's a hit man. For years now he's had places to go and people to kill.

But enough is enough. He's got money in the bank and just one last job standing between him and retirement. So he carries it out with his usual professionalism, and he heads home, and guess what?

One more job. Paid in advance, so what's he going to do? Give the money back? In Des Moines, Keller stalks his designated target and waits for the client to give him the go-ahead. And one fine morning he's picking out stamps for his collection (Sweden 1-5, the official reprints) at a shop in Urbandale when somebody guns down the charismatic governor of Ohio.

Back at his motel, Keller's watching TV when they show the killer's face. And there's something all too familiar about that face. . . .

Keller calls his associate Dot in White Plains, but there is no answer. He's stranded halfway across the country, every cop in America's just seen his picture, his ID and credit cards are no longer good, and he just spent almost all of his cash on the stamps.

Now what?

Alan Furst - Red Gold

Not up to his usual best. Too much atmosphere too little story with less interesting characters.


Book description


From the atmosphere established in his fifth novel's first sentence ("Casson woke in a room in a cheap hotel and smoked his last cigarette") to the knock on the door at the denouement, Furst again proves himself the master of his chosen terrain?behind the lines of Nazi occupation in France during WWII. His previous novel, The World at Night, opened in May 1940, with French film producer Jean Casson setting out to take newsreels of the defense of France's Maginot line and becoming swamped in the German invasion. It is now September 1941, and Casson, broke and hiding under a false name, is about to commit fully to the Resistance. As a man of indeterminate political affiliation, he's chosen to negotiate between the Resistance and the French Communists, who, with the German army on the verge of taking Moscow, have orders from Stalin to sabotage the Nazis in any way possible. The "red gold" SS looters try to steal in Russia is a metaphoric payment in blood, while in Paris informers are everywhere and collaboration is still rampant. Furst's textured plot?exhibiting shifting loyalties and betrayals; lone, often hopeless acts of heroism; and lovers bravely parting?makes for spellbinding drama. (In one scene, a clandestine radio operator broadcasts a few moments too long, and hears soldiers' boots racing up the stairs to get him.) Furst, who deserves the comparisons he's earned to Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, seems to be settling into a franchise here, rather than reaching for the fire he caught in his third novel, The Polish Officer. Casson's story unfolds convincingly, however, and as it continues here to April of 1942, promises a few more episodes to come from this author's tried and true brand of masterfully detailed espionage.

Alan Furst - The Spies of Warsaw

An abso;utely first rate novel for the spie afficianado who likes them complex with no heroes.


Book description
Starred Review. Furst (The Foreign Correspondent) solidifies his status as a master of historical spy fiction with this compelling thriller set in 1937 Poland. Col. Jean-François Mercier, a military attaché at the French embassy in Warsaw who runs a network of spies, plays a deadly game of cat-and-mouse with his German adversaries. When one of Mercier's main agents, Edvard Uhl, an engineer at a large Düsseldorf arms manufacturer who's been a valuable source on the Nazis' new weapons, becomes concerned that the Gestapo is on to him, Mercier initially dismisses Uhl's fears. Mercier soon realizes that the risk to his spy is genuine, and he's forced to scramble to save Uhl's life. The colonel himself later takes to the field when he hears reports that the German army is conducting maneuvers in forested terrain. Even readers familiar with the Germans' attack through the Ardennes in 1940 will find the plot suspenseful. As ever, Furst excels at creating plausible characters and in conveying the mostly tedious routines of real espionage

John Grisham - The Appeal

I returned to Grisham reluctantly. His recent books have been self-indulgent exercises.The reviews had given me hope this would be different. Well, after a slow beginning, overly weighted with anti-corporate diatribes he does deliver a good story with a plausible ending. Ultimately, there are no true villains and heroes, just people.

Book description -

John Grisham was reportedly the best-selling author of the 1990s, and The Appeal, his 20th novel, will likely be yet another massive commercial success. Unlike some of his previous legal thrillers, however, this work has managed to garner an impressive amount of critical respect as well. Although a few reviewers found Grisham's characters one dimensional, his plot hackneyed, and his writing poor, most saw much to admire in the author's convincing and scathing portrayal of judicial corruption. As the Los Angeles Times opined, [I]n this presidential election year, [The Appeal is] a far more blunt, accurate and plain-spoken indictment of our contemporary political system's real failings than you're likely to find anywhere on the nonfiction lists. The verdict: it's informative and compelling, but it's still Grisham.

Geraldine Brooks - People of the Book

This book gets really tedious; fast. There is just so much I (or you) want to know about the history of this Haggadah and book making.


Book description -


Reading Geraldine Brooks's remarkable debut novel, Year of Wonders, or more recently March, which won the Pulitzer Prize, it would be easy to forget that she grew up in Australia and worked as a journalist. Now in her dazzling new novel, People of the Book, Brooks allows both her native land and current events to play a larger role while still continuing to mine the historical material that speaks so ardently to her imagination. Late one night in the city of Sydney, Hanna Heath, a rare book conservator, gets a phone call. The Sarajevo Haggadah, which disappeared during the siege in 1992, has been found, and Hanna has been invited by the U.N. to report on its condition. Missing documents and art works (as Dan Brown and Lev Grossman, among others, have demonstrated) are endlessly appealing, and from this inviting premise Brooks spins her story in two directions. In the present, we follow the resolutely independent Hanna through her thrilling first encounter with the beautifully illustrated codex and her discovery of the tiny signs-a white hair, an insect wing, missing clasps, a drop of salt, a wine stain-that will help her to discover its provenance. Along with the book she also meets its savior, a Muslim librarian named Karaman. Their romance offers both predictable pleasures and genuine surprises, as does the other main relationship in Hanna's life: her fraught connection with her mother. In the other strand of the narrative we learn, moving backward through time, how the codex came to be lost and found, and made. From the opening section, set in Sarajevo in 1940, to the final section, set in Seville in 1480, these narratives show Brooks writing at her very best. With equal authority she depicts the struggles of a young girl to escape the Nazis, a duel of wits between an inquisitor and a rabbi living in the Venice ghetto, and a girl's passionate relationship with her mistress in a harem. Like the illustrations in the Haggadah, each of these sections transports the reader to a fully realized, vividly peopled world. And each gives a glimpse of both the long history of anti-Semitism and of the struggle of women toward the independence that Hanna, despite her mother's lectures, tends to take for granted. Brooks is too good a novelist to belabor her political messages, but her depiction of the Haggadah bringing together Jews, Christians and Muslims could not be more timely. Her gift for storytelling, happily, is timeless.

Linda Fairstein - Bad Blood

Another good thriller from Fairstein. She always delivers.

Book description -

In the exciting ninth Alexandra Cooper legal thriller from bestseller Fairstein (after Death Dance), the Manhattan prosecutor is confronted with the trial lawyer's greatest fear—a witness who's destroyed on the stand. When the defense attorney shows that Kate Meade, the lead witness in Cooper's circumstantial case against Brendan Quillian for the murder of his wife, Amanda, has concealed her affair with the defendant, this revelation of Meade's potential bias has a devastating effect on the prosecution's case. As Cooper struggles to recover, the case takes a whole new twist when a fatal explosion in New York City's third water tunnel, which is under construction, suggests that Amanda's death is connected with other violent acts in the Quillian family's past. While Cooper may engage in a few too many action sequences for legal purists, the crisp writing and Fairstein's enviable capacity to translate her own experience as a prosecutor into an accessible plot puts this series a cut above most entries in this crowded subgenre.

Benjamin Black - The Silver Swan

Well, the reviews were right. Not nearly as good as Christine Falls. It's strongest points are the wonderful descriptions and believable characters. But the story is muddy and lacks any reason for us to care,

Book description -

In this stunning follow-up to 2007's Christine Falls, Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize–winner John Banville) spins a complex tale of murder and deception in 1950s Ireland. Pathologist Garret Quirke, surprised by a visit from a college acquaintance, Billy Hunt, is even more surprised when Billy begs Quirke not to perform an autopsy on his wife, Deirdre, whose naked body was recently retrieved from Dublin Bay. Though everything points to suicide, Quirke knows something's amiss and begins to retrace Deirdre's steps. Black expertly balances Quirke's investigation with chapters detailing Deidre's past, from her marriage to Billy to her shady business deal with Leslie White, an enigmatic Englishman who knew Deidre as Laura Swan, the proprietress of their joint venture, a beauty salon called the Silver Swan. As Quirke digs deeper, he discovers a web of lies and blackmail that threatens to envelop even his own estranged daughter, Phoebe. Laconic, stubborn Quirke makes an appealing hero as the pieces of this unsettling crime come together in a shocking conclusion

Drew Gilpin Faust - This Republic of Suffering

Unbearably long and drawn out.

Book Description:

Battle is the dramatic centerpiece of Civil War history; this penetrating study looks instead at the somber aftermath. Historian Faust (Mothers of Invention) notes that the Civil War introduced America to death on an unprecedented scale and of an unnatural kind—grisly, random and often ending in an unmarked grave far from home. She surveys the many ways the Civil War generation coped with the trauma: the concept of the Good Death—conscious, composed and at peace with God; the rise of the embalming industry; the sad attempts of the bereaved to get confirmation of a soldier's death, sometimes years after war's end; the swelling national movement to recover soldiers' remains and give them decent burials; the intellectual quest to find meaning—or its absence—in the war's carnage. In the process, she contends, the nation invented the modern culture of reverence for military death and used the fallen to elaborate its new concern for individual rights. Faust exhumes a wealth of material—condolence letters, funeral sermons, ads for mourning dresses, poems and stories from Civil War–era writers—to flesh out her lucid account. The result is an insightful, often moving portrait of a people torn by grief

Susan Choi - A Person of Interest

A really great new (for me author. She does a fabulous job of bringing to life and making sympathetic, a very alienated immigrant. We travel along with him as he tries to understand his motivations and experiences that he has supressed. Well worth while.


Book description -


After fictionalizing elements of the Patty Hearst kidnapping for her second novel (the 2004 Pulitzer finalist American Woman), Choi combines elements of the Wen Ho Lee accusations and the Unabomber case to create a haunting meditation on the myriad forms of alienation. The suggestively named Lee, as he's called throughout, is a solitary Chinese émigré math professor at the end of an undistinguished Midwestern university career. He remains bitter after two very different failed marriages, despite his love for Esther, his globe-trotting grown daughter from the first marriage. As the book opens, Lee's flamboyant, futurist colleague in the next-door office, Hendley, is gravely wounded when Hendley opens a package that violently explodes. Two pages later, a jealous, resentful Lee felt himself briefly thinking Oh, good. As a did-he or didn't-he investigation concerning Lee, the novel's person of interest, unfolds, Lee's carefully ordered existence unravels, and chunks of his painful past are forced into the light. While a cagily sympathetic FBI man named Jim Morrison and Lee's former colleague Fasano (who links the bombings to several other technologists) play well-turned supporting roles, Choi's reflections from Lee's gruffly brittle point of view are as intricate and penetrating as the shifting intrigue surrounding the bomb. The result is a magisterial meditation on appearance and misunderstanding as it plays out for Lee as spouse, colleague, exile and citizen.

Linda Fairstein - Entombed

Book description -

Series heroine Alexandra Cooper, head of Manhattan's sex crimes unit, returns in a novel that might have been titled "Nevermore,": focused as it is on the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. When the body of a two-decades-old skeleton is found bricked up behind a wall in a soon-to-be-demolished building where Poe once lived, it looks like a very cold case indeed. But then that old murder is linked to a more current slaying, one that at first looks like the work of the Silk Stocking Rapist, Alex's old enemy, who terrorized the upper East Side of Manhattan several years ago but hasn't been heard from since. As usual, Alex and her good friends, detectives Mercer Wallace and Mike Chapman, take the reader to an area of New York most tourists never see--in this case, the Bronx Botanical Gardens and its wild, forested environs--and bring it dramatically to life. Just in case Poe ever has his own category on Alex's favorite TV show, there’s enough trivia included about the master of the macabre's life and work to propel any reader to Final Jeopardy. Entombed is a smart, stylish, well-told tale.

Linda Fairstein - Killer Heat

She always does a great job and the characters are fun to live with.


Book Description -


At the start of bestseller Fairstein's nail-biting 10th legal thriller to feature alter ego Alex Cooper (after 2006's Bad Blood), the Manhattan ADA takes a hit from a cigar at the urging of her longtime police ally, Mike Chapman—to cover the stench of a badly decomposed female body at a crime scene in an abandoned building near the Staten Island ferry. The victim later proves to be the first of a number of women in uniform targeted by the murderer, who may have military ties in his past. The trail leads to a notorious bar catering to underage drinkers, before a chance observation by a civilian shifts the inquiry dramatically. Meanwhile, Cooper is preparing to try Floyd Warren, a rapist whose first trial three decades earlier ended in a hung jury. Fairstein, whose professional résumé includes groundbreaking work in the field of sex crimes prosecution, manages to both entertain and educate, as Cooper struggles with the evidentiary challenges of the Warren rape case and with tracking a vicious serial killer.

Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

Gregor von Rezzori - Memoirs of an Anti-Semite

This is a strong recommendation to read a very different kind of book. There are many books that speak to the experiences of holocaust victims; there are even a few devoted to the stories of the perpetrators. This book attempts to explore the public bystanders that allowed it to happen through indifference or a willingness to accept the government storyline about the problems caused by Jews.

The story is set in Eastern Europe where the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after WWI has left many people feeling at risk - financially and culturally. It is before the Nazi's major push into Eastern Europe and before the Final Solution. They are on the cusp of the holocaust, but don't know it. They go on with their daily lives. The narrator (he's no hero!) is the child of minor nobility trying to get by in a no longer familiar world. He is no Nazi, but has inherited an attitude of anti-semitism that informs his actions - or lack thereof. He lives in a milieu with many Jews from rag-pickers to professionals and businessmen. Many are more educated and wealthier than he is. He has many close relationships with Jewish neighbors growing up; in fact, some of his closest friends growing up are Jews. He 'loves' them, but his anti-semitism, so deeply rooted in his perceptions of class and family, relegates them to less than fully human.

The over-riding focus of this book is how the holocaust could happen, and by inference, happen again? The "Holy War" between Muslims and Christians? No-one knew what was about to happen then; what it is that we don't know now?

Book Description
The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth-century’s ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator’s Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just his relationship that has blinded him to–and makes him complicit in–the terrible realities his era.

Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori’s most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.

Jimmy Breslin - The Good Rat - A True Story

Book description -

Breslin, renowned journalist and author of The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, revisits a familiar wise-guy milieu in this collection of stories and anecdotes about the mob. His writing, like the Mafia itself, breezily transitions from humorous to horrifying as he regales the reader with loosely connected tales of mistaken identity, crooked cops, snitches and murder. Unlike the Sopranos and the many other touchstones of the American love affair with organized crime, for Breslin, there's good and there's evil, with little in between. As always, however, nicknames are half the fun, as Sammy The Bull Gravano, Tony Café and Gaspipe Casso take the stage in the Mafia hotspots of the five boroughs, including Greenpoint, in Brooklyn, and Ozone Park, in Queens, as Breslin delights with stories from the Mafia's heyday. Breslin's storytelling is set to the sweet background music of one of the mob's biggest canaries, Burton Kaplan, as he sings to a grand jury. The author's vernacular precision contrasts sharply with the plodding sterility of Kaplan's grand jury testimony, and as we find out, good guys can often tell ugly stories more authentically than the bad guys. The effect is tragicomic as Kaplan's testimony sounds the death knell for his associates. These stories unveil the strict code of conduct, often broken, of a dying breed. According to Kaplan, however, while illegal gambling and extortion may be waning industries, the myth of the American Mafia will never die.

Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia

Oliver Sacks is a well known medical science writer specializing in the brain. He is best known for the "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" about catastrophic brain disease. In this new book, he focuses on music and the brain. He believes that humans are uniquely equipped by evolution to understand and appreciate music. His books are filled with interesting anecodotes and examples from the lives of individuals and are a pleasure to read.

I was particularly drawn to this book because I am one of a significant number of people who cannot appreciate music. He estimates 1 in 300.

He refers to these people as 'amusical'. It can be the result of genetics (my sisters are amusical too) or an injury or stroke. What interested me most was that it is not related to hearing. In fact he cites some individuals with perfect pitch, who cannot yet hear music only as a series of sounds--often unpleasant. There are interesting variations relating to melody, rhythm and tone. To some people (me included) music is just sound, not unpleasant, just white noise. Some others find it unbearable, like pots and pans crashing about. Fortunately, my problem is pretty benign. I don't find music unpleasant, just boring. I relate to the words and for me it's sort of like poetry.

I found the book a pleasure to read; it's filled with interesting case studies and anecdotes. While it was comforting to read about others just like me, it still leaves me really sad that I can't appreciate or share a love of music like most of my friends.

Book description
Sacks is an unparalleled chronicler of modern medicine, and fans of his work will find much to enjoy when he turns his prodigious talent for observation to music and its relationship to the brain. The subtitle aptly frames the book as a series of medical case studies-some in-depth, some abruptly short. The tales themselves range from the relatively mundane (a song that gets stuck on a continuing loop in one's mind) through the uncommon (Tourette's or Parkinson's patients whose symptoms are calmed by particular kinds of music) to the outright startling (a man struck by lightning subsequently developed a new found passion and talent for the concert piano). In this latest collection, Sacks introduces new and fascinating characters, while also touching on the role of music in some of his classic cases (the man who mistook his wife for a hat makes a brief appearance). Though at times the narrative meanders, drawing connections through juxtaposition while leaving broader theories to be inferred by the reader, the result is greater than the sum of its parts. This book leaves one a little more attuned to the remarkable complexity of human beings, and a bit more conscious of the role of music in our lives.

Daniel Silva - The Secret Servant

Book description -

Bestseller Silva's superlative seventh novel to feature Gabriel Allon, the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence, puts Silva squarely atop the spy thriller heap. When Solomon Rosner, a professor in Amsterdam who's also a secret Israeli asset, is assassinated for his strident reports and articles detailing the dangers of militant Islam within the Netherlands, Gabriel gets the job to clean out the professor's files. In Amsterdam, the Israeli agent and his old partner, Eli Lavon, unearth a plot that leads to the kidnapping by Islamic extremists of the daughter of the U.S. ambassador in London. While most intelligence agencies consider Gabriel persona non grata because of his unorthodox methods and the trail of bodies he leaves in his wake, he once again proves invaluable as he and his stalwart team hunt down some of Israel's—and the world's—most violent enemies. While you don't have to have read the earlier books in the series (The Messenger, etc.), knowing the history of the returning characters adds depth and color to the overall story

Minette Walters - The Dark Room

Book description -

British suspense writer Walters, each of whose previous books (The Ice House, The Sculptress and The Scold's Bridle) has won an award, now has a new publisher and a big promotional push behind her. Unfortunately, the new book is her weakest to date?overplotted and rather unconvincing. It rests on an interesting premise, however: its heroine, Jinx Kingsley, who has been found drunk and disoriented on an abandoned airfield in Wiltshire after apparently trying to kill herself by wrecking her car, is suspected of several murders?but can't, after her accident, remember anything that happened for several vital days. Her husband had been mysteriously killed some years before?and now her fiance and the girlfriend with whom he has been cheating on Jinx are missing. Can her powerful millionaire father be involved? And what about the man who is savagely attacking prostitutes in the area? As Jinx tries, in a local clinic run by sympathetic Dr. Alan Protheroe, to recover her memory and exorcise dark terrors hovering at the edge of her mind, several well-observed police investigators dig out fragments of her story. But that story is so complicated, and filled with such a welter of walk-on characters, many of them ultimately insignificant, that the reader loses patience. Jinx herself is not made sufficiently sympathetic to win interest, her growing affection for Dr. Protheroe seems half-hearted and the ultimate murderer, when finally unmasked, comes right out of left field. Walters is highly talented, but perhaps she is working too fast

Benjamin Black - Christine Falls

Pretty good effort. Interesting characters and a passable mystery.


Book description -


Dalton uses all his pacing and vocal skills and his wonderful, deep Welsh tones to keep listeners engaged and on edge through this mystery set in 1950s Dublin and Boston. He skillfully sustains our empathy for widowed Dublin coroner Quirke, the alcoholic, angry and acerbic narrator who drags himself into solving the mystery of Christine Falls's death in childbirth and the disappearance of her newborn—a scenario that parallels Quirke's own experience. Black (pseudonym of Booker Prize–winner John Banville) is a fine writer, reminiscent of P.D. James in his care for language and his emphasis on psychologically complex characters, including Mel, Quirke's obstetrician stepbrother; Sarah, Mel's wife (and sister of Quirke's dead wife), whose love for Quirke is reciprocated; and Mel and Sarah's confused daughter, Phoebe. Black weaves his characters through a neat and original plot that descends into the dark depths of Quirke's family history and rises to the highest ranks of the Catholic church. Detective fiction readers will love Black's writing and Dalton's reading, and look forward to more from both.

Laura Lippman - No Good Deeds

Book Description -

Smartly plotted and paced, Lippman's ninth Tess Monaghan novel (after By a Spider's Thread) opens with a somewhat unlikely scenario: Tess's boyfriend, Edgar "Crow" Ransome, brings home for the night a homeless teenager, Lloyd, who slashed Crow's tires outside a Baltimore soup kitchen. When PI Tess discovers that Lloyd has information regarding the recent murder of Assistant U.S. Attorney Gregory Youssef, Tess gives his story, sans name, to the local paper, so the authorities will get it secondhand. After a crony of Lloyd's is murdered instead of Lloyd, Tess receives her first visit from a sinister trio of law enforcement agents avid to know her source. Crow flees with Lloyd while Tess suffers growing pressure, including the threat of federal jail time. Baltimore itself is the book's most compelling character, its uneasy mix of aspiration and decay perfectly suited to Lippman's ironic voice. Crow is the book's weakest link; even a late revelation about his motives fails to make his sudden paternalism toward Lloyd believable. Happily, Lippman's loyal fans won't mind.