His ex-wife is angry at him, his fiancee has just dumped him, and a stunning, unabashed colleague is about to upstage him in a career move. You'll find out when Joe does, and in the meantime you'll feel for him and reel with him as he tries to keep his life on a somewhat even keel. The New York backdrop is well done, and there's a great cameo appearance by a young Rupert Murdoch-like Aussie who wants to gobble up media. Susan Ericksen performs. As the election draws near, each side accuses the other of manipulating the tragedy to their own advantage.
Recriminations fly, but nobody can come up with a scenario that makes any sense, until . . .
The tension builds, too, in Sue Grafton's newest addition to her best-selling Kinsey Millhone alphabet mysteries. Selma's husband Tom, a good man and honest detective in the small town of Nota Lake, Nevada, died of natural causes, but he was deeply bothered in the preceding weeks. Not expecting much to come of her investigation, Kinsey soon realizes that something very wrong and very troubling was and is going on and that someone will do very nasty things to make sure that she doesn't find out what it is. Joanna Trollope runs through some the permutations in her quietly affecting new novel, The Best of Friends . Lawrence and Gina had been the best of friends since they were teenagers, but Lawrence married Hilary and had three children, and Gina married Fergus and had a daughter.