Rating: 
Summary: No food while driving for this one!
Review: I love listening to Jay Patterson. He is one of my favorite readers. The various and quirky sub-plots all come together for a slam-bang and quite unexpected ending. I was gagging when the torture scenes were playing out of the cassette player (and I'm talking about the pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road kind)and Hannibal has nothing over the "Surgeon". Ouch! Characters were a little too good at what they did all around from the good guys to the bad guys. But overall a very good listen.
Rating: 
Summary: Raves for Colin Harrison
Review: "Both Koontz's and Perry's work could have been helped enormously by the kind of rigorous authenticity that Colin Harrison brings to every page of AFTERBURN, not just a tightly structured novel of suspense but a rich and textured tale of character-as-destiny . . . Unlike so many other recent American crime novels (James Ellroy's, for example) AFTERBURN never splinters into cheap nihilism. Heroism and loyalty are still virtues here; they're just awfully hard to practice. Hard, not impossible. Harrison has created a world that's dangerous, cruel, overbright, too fast, and unreliable--but a world that's worth staying alive in. This is a serious, stylish, generously humane work of fiction. A."--Tom De Haven, Entertainment Weekly"A startlingly original book, AFTERBURN is a wide-ranging thriller that extends far beyond the typecast confines of the genre . . . In AFTERBURN truth is extracted only by extreme brutality, well-meaning souls are shackled to infirm, infertile bodies, and a person's inglorious past is ever present. No bad deed is forgotten, and no good deed goes unpunished."--Tim Sultan, GQ "Mr. Harrison is a writer of serious talent . . . AFTERBURN is full of memorable sequences . . . The author conjures vivid milieus (a Shanghai construction site, a hidden Long Island cottage, a Big Apple parking garage) and populates them with eccentrics worthy of Balzac or Dickens . . . AFTERBURN mesmerizes and convinces."--Tom Nolan, The Wall Street Journal
Rating: 
Summary: New York Noir at its Finest
Review: Charlie Ravich is a very successful telecommunicaitons mogul in his late fifties, however he is racked with injuries he got during his time as a POW during the Vietnam war. On a trip to Hong Kong, where he is trying to get a factory built, he witnesses a murder and it winds up making him wealthy, very wealthy. But money won't buy you everything. Or will it. Charlie's son died from leukemia years ago, his wife is slipping away with Alzheimer's and Charlie is obsessed with his pending oblivion. He desperately wants someone to carry on his name. So he advertises for a woman to have his child.
Christina Wells is a pretty young thing just out of the joint, where she spent four years. She's gone to Columbia University, so you know she's smart, but she dropped out to lead the life of a small time grifter. She'd been raped when she was a little girl and it haunts her. Well, maybe she's not so smart, because she spent the fours years behind bars, because she took the rap for her iron-pumping, former boyfriend, Rick Bocca, who somehow found out when she was getting out on a surprise release. It seems that somehow five million went missing from that job she went up for and he wants it back.
This is a well written and well paced story with an ending which doesn't leave you wanting or feeling short-changed. The characters are a little over the top, but Mr. Harrison is such a honeydripper of a writer, who throws people and situations together so well, that we don't care, in fact instead, we revel in his character's excesses. This novel is film noir on the written page and is really, very, very good.
Rating: 
Summary: A Waste of Paper and Time
Review: I am at a complete loss as to how anyone could have liked this book. .... The author goes through great lengths to set up these characters and their lives (hundreds of pages of overly descriptive prose about asian finance, artifical ensemination and retirement homes), and all for absolutely no reason. Almost none of it had any bearing what-so-ever on the story or ultimately on the fate of the characters. ....
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