About book The Garden Of Eden And Other Criminal Delights (2006)
Audio book, review from 2008:This was a lot of short stories all written or co-written by the author. Most of them were really no good. The writing annoyed me, the characters annoyed me, and some of them just had nothing what so ever to do with "criminal delights" and should not have been in there at all. Most of these were near the end and almost unbearable. :p I suffered through them all though. There were a couple of interesting ones, and the only ones worth checking out:Mummy and Jack-A re-telling of Jack the Ripper in a way of sorts. Pretty creepy and entertaining.Bonding-Seems like a story a step father would write as his fantasy of his step-daughter, but it was still at least entertaining.Mr. Barton's Head Case-About a man who's a hit man and is kind of in love with his car, and then it starts talking to him. And so do some other objects. Kind of interesting.But, the overall MOST interesting thing about this audio book was that Mom and me were both listening to it at the same time, without knowing it, and both thinking it was stupid. I started saying that I was listening to a stupid audio book about short mystery stories, and she said she was too, and eventually we found out it was the same one. :p So, we both pretty much wasted our time... :p
I really do like short stories. They just read faster than a novel, and right now that's a big bonus!This collection is an interesting assortment of Peter/Rina stories and more personal things written by Kellerman. One isn't actually a story, but a reminiscence of the author's childhood and her memories of her father. My favorites, of course, are the ones with the characters I've grown to love in the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series. This is a family I just really like, primarily because their interactions are so normal and real. The story about the girl Rina tries to help out, whom she meets at her Jewish culture class, is sad and bizarre and unusual in that we really don't know the ending; there is no closure. I also like the story co-written by Kellerman and her daughters, told from the perspective of a mother and her two daughters after the father wins the lottery. Nice story, nice teaching.Several of these have appeared in other formats, or in collections I've already read, so I knew where the story was going. However, the majority are new (to me) and interesting. Quick read.
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Maybe this is what happens when you are a well-published author of mysteries and need money to send a kid off to college or buy a vacation house at the beach – you round up all your odds and sods of writings you started and never made into books, and publish them as a ‘collection’ of short pieces, described on the cover as “an extraordinary anthology of her best short writing.” Good for two nights of escape reading but not much else – some didn’t even rise to the level of stories but just snippets.
—pdxmaven
