Catching Up: Three Books I Finished Recently

Three quick reads, all enjoyable. Especially the one by Elinor Lipman, who is new to me (via Laura Lippman).

Picture Perfect by Jodi Picoult
ebook 1-4295-3335-8
iPod Touch, eReader Pro
copyright 1995

As Picture Perfect begins, it is daybreak in downtown L.A. A woman suffering from amnesia is taken in by an officer new to the L.A. police force, after he finds her wandering aimlessly near a graveyard. Days later, when her husband comes to claim her at the police station, no one is more stunned than Cassie Barrett to learn that not only is she a renowned anthropologist, but she is married to Hollywood's leading man, Alex Rivers.

A Date You Can't Refuse by Harley Jane Kozak
ebook 978-0-307-58871-5
iPod Touch, eReader Pro
copyright 2009

Wollie Shelley isn't happy about taking the job as a "social coach" at MediaRex, but the FBI makes her an offer she can't refuse. If she agrees to infiltrate the company, they'll guarantee that her schizophrenic brother will have a home at the federally subsidized halfway house he's come to love.

So Wollie launches into teaching three foreign celebrities how to cope with the customs of Beverly Hills, improve their English, and become Oprah-ready. And when a coyote-chewed corpse appears in the MediaRex compound, Wollie realizes that her colleagues are concealing some serious secrets of their own.

The Dearly Departed by Elinor Lipman
ebook 1-58836-013-x
iPod Touch, eReader Pro
copyright 2001

With her latest work, Elinor Lipman expertly serves up her usual delicious dish of entertainment. When the story opens, the not-so-sunny Sunny Batten has just received news that causes her to be even more morose than usual: her mother, Margaret Batten, has died in a freak accident with Margaret’s alleged fiancé, Miles Finn. Thus Sunny returns to the small New Hampshire town of King George and to the charity bungalow on the edge of the country club’s golf course where Margaret raised Sunny by herself. While at the funeral, Sunny catches her first glimpse of the brash Fletcher Finn, Miles Finn’s son and self-described possessor of “a heart of plutonium.” And who can’t help but notice, as they sit together at the graveside, the resemblance between Sunny and Fletcher, “the flagrant display, wherever one looked, of Miles Finn’s genes” [p. 79]?