Kino is a pearl diver in La Paz, Mexico, eking out a meager subsistence living for his wife, Juana, and their infant son, Coyotito. When Coyotito is stung by a scorpion, Kino is both embarrassed and angered by the fact that the arrogant, self-centered town doctor is unwilling to help because they are unable to pay. Diving long and deep, perhaps to cool off his anger or perhaps to find an extra pearl or two so that he might have the money for his son's care, he emerges from the Gulf of Mexico with the largest, most exquisite pearl that his community has ever seen. It is quickly labeled as "The Pearl of the World".

Thinking it to be the future source of his family's future health, comfort, happiness and peace, Kino seeks to sell it to the local pearl buyers who attempt to swindle him, offering only a fraction of its real value. When the pearl becomes the target of sneak thieves in the middle of the night, Kino kills the thief defending himself, his family and the pearl that is now the central focus of their lives.

Kino and Juana realize that the doctor, the priest and those already possessed of wealth in the town are angry that he should presume to step out of his station. While their friends, the other pearl fishermen, are happy for Kino's good fortune they are also jealous and convinced that Kino's sudden wealth will change him into a new person - a person that, in some fashion, will choose to distance himself from the people he formerly loved and valued.

Steinbeck's story writing skills are eloquent, compelling, and impossibly tight and concise but, at the same time, astonishingly profound and moving. Steinbeck's writing is the very antithesis of the style of Charles Dickens, for example, another consummate storyteller, but one who never failed to write astonishingly complex sentences and paragraphs using an enormous number of words where one would do.

For example, when Kino said, "I am a man", insisting that he must defend his family and his goods, Steinbeck perfectly described a woman's understanding of what a man meant when he said that:

"It meant that he was half insane and half God. It meant that Kino would drive his strength against a mountain and plunge his strength against the sea. Juana, in her woman's soul, knew that the mountain would stand while the man broke himself; that the sea would surge while the man drowned in it."

On the flip side, any female reader today would appreciate Steinbeck's brief but powerful statement of his admiration of their good sense:

"Sometimes the quality of woman, the reason, the caution, the sense of preservation could cut through Kino's manness and save them all."

Read on the surface, "The Pearl" is a beautifully told, sadly moving parable that expounds on the often repeated childhood mantra, "Money can't buy happiness". A slightly more sophisticated reader will also take away the message that wealth is equivalent to power which, as we all come to know, can be its own evil leading to corruption and deceit. A deeper analytical reading, perhaps from a world-weary, more cynical adult, may give rise to the conclusion that, writing in the early 1960s, Steinbeck was also indulging in a political criticism of the wealthy class and the authorities. Perhaps he was even expounding on the virtues of socialism, a political posture that was, to say the least, unpopular in the USA at that time.

However you choose to read it, "The Pearl" is a short novella, easily read in a mere two to three hours, that deserves to be in a library of classic American literature.

Paul Weiss

It's a sad fact that world history is rife with complex, deeply disturbing stories of mass murders and genocides by governments and dictators - Germany, Japan and China, Uganda, Haiti and more. The list is all too lengthy. Temperance Brennan, forensic pathologist, is on site in Guatemala helping the current government to clear up a period in their history that they have chosen to expose to the light of day and the scrutiny of a critical world that they hope will forgive them for their actions in a dirtier past.

When she's ambushed by gunmen and an investigative reporter is brutally murdered, it becomes apparent that, despite the government's wishes for an open investigation of the massacre, there are obviously secrets that someone will do almost anything to keep buried. Temperance Brennan comes to the realization that she may be on somebody's hit list.

On the plus side, Temperance Brennan is a somewhat more focused, considerably less angst-ridden character than her American counterpart, Kay Scarpetta, as she is portrayed in the Patricia Cornwell novels. That's certainly not to say that she's flat and without a certain depth and flair. "Grave Secrets", for example, finds Brennan torn between two lovers, her long-time Canadian friend, Lt Andrew Ryan, and Bartolomé Galiano, a hotter blooded, more ardent Hispanic sort of more recent acquaintance.

Publisher's Weekly was graphic and rather effusive in their praise of the novel. They talked about skillfully interwoven plots and red herrings that melted into "a satisfying puddle of sex, sleaze, greed and gore". For my taste, I'd prefer to see a little more focus on the mechanics of forensic investigation and a little less attention to a plot that I believe was too complex by half.

Leave the plots and counter-plots to the international spy vs spy intrigue thrillers, I say. If you're going to create a protagonist who's a skilled forensic pathologist, then let her do her work. Don't attempt to make her all things to all people capable of puzzling through plots so complex as to defy believability and the best police efforts of two countries.

Paul Weiss

Despite being firmly slotted into the legal thriller genre, Steve Martini's novel "Double Tap" is most unequivocally not a thriller. And while that may sound like bad news for potential readers and existing Steve Martini fans, that statement is most unequivocally not a condemnation or criticism of what is an exceptionally interesting novel.

The story is simple. Madelyn Chapman is a powerful, wealthy, beautiful, and extremely self-indulgent business woman - the CEO of a high-tech software firm whose main customer is the US government. She has been found in her home murdered with two very tightly grouped gunshot wounds to the head. This particular style of murder is called a "double tap" in the trade and is typically the signature of a professional assassin who, by the bye, is also a superb marksman.

The case against Emiliano Ruiz, a career soldier, is rock solid and defense attorney Paul Madriani is worried about his inability to explain certain obvious gaps in his client's military résumé that Ruiz steadfastly refuses to clarify. In the face of almost overwhelming evidence against his client, Madriani doggedly investigates the case and begins to bump into dangerous secrets that the government, the military and the new CEO of Chapman's firm would prefer stay under the darkest and deepest cover.

In the same manner as a police procedural is not a suspense thriller, "Double Tap" is not a legal thriller. It's definitely a legal procedural with an almost encyclopedic wealth of fascinating minutiae on the details of a trial for capital murder - the pre-trial investigations that would be undertaken by a defense attorney; motions and counter motions; side bars; forensic examination of evidence; objections sustained and over-ruled; side bars; characterization and selection of "expert" witnesses; potential grounds for appeal and mistrial; jury selection; discovery; arraignment; witness lists; required disclosure of evidence; media coverage; and much, much more.

Steve Martini's description of Emiliano Ruiz's trial for murder was compelling and utterly absorbing - the proverbial page turner, to be sure - but, sadly, the ending when it came was almost anti-climactic. In all fairness, the clues were all there and the characters had definitely been introduced in the course of the novel. To call the ending "deus ex machina" would be quite incorrect. But, in comparison with the body of the novel, it arrived with a bit of a thud and was definitely a let down.

One star reduction from what would otherwise have been a five star barn burner. Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

As most international spy vs spy intrigue type thrillers are wont to do, Daniel Silva's latest thriller, "The English Assassin", moves from locale to locale across Europe with rather dizzying speed.

Silva's underlying premise to the story is the fact that Switzerland, while claiming neutrality during WW II, was actually considerably less than a mere sideline observer to the proceedings of the war. Indeed, it appears that not only were they willing participants in Nazi Germany's veritable raping and pillaging of galleries, personal collections, museums, churches and public buildings of the priceless art treasures they contained, but they were also private bankers and money laundering agents for the senior members of the Nazi elite. The aristocratic families of the Swiss banking oligarchy, having become unimaginably wealthy through this illicit relationship, will now do almost anything to prevent a modern world from exposing their sordid history and forcing the return of the ill-gotten art treasures and the related wealth to their rightful owners.

Gabriel Allon, one of the world's foremost art restorers (and, coincidentally, a member of the Israeli Secret Service) has been commissioned to restore a Raphael painting belonging to Swiss banker, Augustus Rolfe. When he arrives at Rolfe's home, he is shocked to discover that Rolfe has been brutally murdered and that he is the number one suspect in the crime. The Swiss police are unable to make the charges stick and when Allon is released with orders to leave the country and never return, he vows to investigate to discover who was responsible for such an obvious set-up and (you'll pardon the pun) frame job!

He returns undercover to Switzerland seeking to question Rolfe's daughter, Anna, a world famous violinist, and, as Sherlock Holmes put it so very often, the game was afoot! Allon and Rolfe are now the targets of a shadowy assassin hired by a secretive Swiss cabal of bankers who intend to ensure that the secrets of WW II remain locked in Swiss vaults and safe from prying outside eyes!

In Gabriel Allon, Daniel Silva has created a memorable hero with significant colour and depth that fans will want to follow further. In this particular story, the clever pairing of a reclusive art restorer with a moody, temperamental, world class concert violinist allows for an extremely interesting exploration of the arts world in Europe, from both historical and current points of view. While not quite at the level of travelogue, Silva's attention to detail in placing his action in various European cities provides an extra dose of reality and interest to a plot that is already quite satisfying.

"The English Assassin" is certainly more than workmanlike and, while I enjoyed it, I thought it less than spectacular. The genre of intrigue thrillers is a crowded one, indeed, and while it benefits from Silva's addition, "The English Assassin" is not a standout such as Ken Follett's "Eye of the Needle" or Jack Higgin's "The Eagle Has Landed".

Recommended.

Paul Weiss

There are many, many arguments on both sides of the capital punishment issue. But perhaps one of the most powerful arguments against the use of capital punishment is that, every once in a while, the justice system goes seriously off the rails and makes a tragic mistake.

As a young man, Robert Williamson was an exceptionally skilled baseball player. Thinking himself destined for the major leagues, he began to lead a self-indulgent debauched life style that ultimately would lead to nowhere but trouble, self-destruction and severe mental illness. Robert Williamson and his alleged co-conspirator were definitely not nice people. But neither were they rapists.

"The Innocent Man" is the story of the blind, single-minded quest of the Oklahoma judicial system to arrest, imprison and execute a man for the 1982 rape and murder of a cocktail waitress. It was a very near call but, ultimately, Robert Williamson was proven to be innocent and released before his rapidly nearing date with the executioner.

Even those who believe in either the deterrent or the punishment argument on the pro-side of the capital punishment debate will be un-nerved by this near miss of a system gone so badly wrong.

Unfortunately, the writing in "The Innocent Man" is not as compelling as it might have been give the nature of the subject matter. But it is still quite gripping and certainly important enough that every thinking citizen should read it and make themselves aware that this kind of miscarriage of justice can and does happen.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Fifty years after its initial publication in 1960, "To Kill a Mockingbird" has proven it deserves its place in anyone's list of the finest American classic literature ever written.

Written a scant three years before Martin Luther King awed the world with his magnificent "I have a dream" speech, Harper Lee also stunned the world with a poignant story centered on the unconscionable treatment accorded to the black man in USA's Deep South.

Tom Robinson, a productive, quietly proud and well-spoken black man who by today's standards might even be called an "Uncle Tom", is also cautiously subservient, withdrawn and all too aware of his underwhelming place in the society of Maycomb, Georgia, a sleepy white town in the heartland of America's confederate South.

Tom stands accused of the rape of Mayall Ewell, the 19 year old daughter of a boorish ne'er-do-well white trash family that, to the best recollection of everyone in the town, has never put in a day's work in its collective life. Jeremy Atticus Finch is a gentlemanly white lawyer who, despite the virulent hatred his own community is directing at him, has decided to hold firm to his own convictions about the equality of all men before God and to accept his assignment to the responsibility for Tom's defense at his capital trial for the rape of a white woman - a trial that is expected to be little more than a formality with scant necessity for reference to facts and truth.

"To Kill a Mockingbird" is not a legal thriller, although it certainly could have been. Rather, it is a story about human behaviour - kindness and cruelty; bigotry, hatred and prejudice versus acceptance and friendship; humour and pathos in the presence of sadness and dejection. Told from the point of view of Atticus Finch's children, Scout and her older brother Jem, we are witness to their father's poignant heart-warming attempts to teach his children to become the kind of citizens that, fifty years later, are sadly still the exception rather than the rule.

There can be few people (like me) left who haven't had the privilege of either reading "To Kill a Mockingbird" or seeing the movie, but if you are among that small number, do yourself a favour. Read it sooner than later.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Originally published in 1924, this is the first collection of short stories featuring the pairing of the rotund, little Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and his friend and companion, Captain Arthur Hastings.

It is quite clear that Dame Agatha Christie owes a great deal to her predecessor, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his creation of the pairing of Holmes and Watson. Indeed, the comparisons are so clear and so plentiful that it would undoubtedly make a very interesting English literature essay to prepare an exhaustive list of the similarities and differences between these stories and the ones that Doyle published a quarter century earlier.

This is not to suggest that these stories are derivative by any means. Poirot is his own man and, in the hands of Dame Agatha Christie, became a fascinating character, well loved by all fans of the mystery genre.

Whether you prefer Holmes or Poirot, Conan Doyle or Christie, I think it's safe to say that all readers will reach at least one unanimous conclusion. In the short story genre, the mystery and plot of necessity is less complex. The real joy in these stories rests in the detectives' methods and the near magical solution of a perplexing mystery; the development of the characters; the interplay between Holmes and Watson or Poirot and Hastings; and the playful way in which Holmes or Poirot irreverently tweak their partners' noses with their ability to see without observing.

Here's my personal take on the winner in the early 20th century mystery stakes. In the short story department, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle beats out Dame Agatha Christie by a nose. But, in the full length novel arena, Poirot beats out Holmes by several lengths.

Regardless of whether you agree with that general thought, "Poirot Investigates" is great fun. Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Eve Duncan, one of the world's best known forensic sculptors, specializes in the recreation of facial features from skulls. Having lost her beloved daughter, Bonnie, to abduction and murder and having suffered the anguish of never having found the body, her passion is helping parents in a similar situation. She reconstructs heads and faces and confirms the identification of skeletal remains so that grieving parents can find closure and move on with their lives.

When she receives a call from Luis Montalvo, a sleazy but powerful smuggler of illegal armaments and drugs in South America, asking for help with the identification of a skull, her first inclination is to tell him to push off; that she simply isn't inclined, at any price, to help someone who enriches himself by doing so much harm in the world.

But, in exchange for her forensic reconstruction of this skull, Montalvo promises to put all of his wealth, all his manpower and all of his underworld contacts into an effort to find Duncan's daughter's body and to identify her killer. This is a lure that Duncan is helpless to resist and she finds herself quickly on the way to South America even though she doubts Montalvo will keep his word. Duncan is quite certain that she'll find herself in an unmarked grave after she completes the task.

I've read a couple of other Johansen novels in which I found Eve Duncan's angst and never-ending obsession with the disappearance of her daughter to be tiresome. But "Stalemate" avoids this problem entirely. It's a topnotch thriller that keeps the excitement meter pushed to the stops for the entire novel. Instead of allowing Duncan's angst to become tedious, Johansen has cleverly used it to allow Duncan's complex character to grow and develop and to add depth and details to the story of her stormy relationship with former FBI agent Joe Quinn. Best of all, she allows Duncan to experience an almost irresistible attraction to Montalvo, a man who at the same time represents everything that repulses her.

But that infernal ending (that's not nice, Ms Johansen!) ... it's a cliff-hanger that almost guarantees you'll be off to the bookstore to purchase "Quicksand". You'll want to find out where this whole thing with Montalvo and Duncan is going to end!

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

Paul Schumann, a notorious hit man for the New York Mafia, has finally been nabbed. But the feds have offered him a choice - accept a dangerous undercover government assignment in pre-war Germany or never see the outside of a prison again! The job is to assassinate Reinhard Ernst, the Nazi genius responsible for Hitler's re-armament program who is systematically defying the terms of Germany's surrender WW I and engineering a key component of Hitler's incendiary rise to power and providing him with the matches to light the fuse to WW II.

But when the operation fails, Schumann finds himself in the sights of Willi Kohl, Berlin's best homicide detective; a police operative who Schumann is dismayed to discover is far smarter and far more efficient than any of his North American opposite numbers.

"Garden of Beasts" is a fascinating historical thriller that is part psychological and part suspense with significant servings of provocative discussion about the meaning of good and evil. The historical context of the story is impeccably detailed and absolutely fascinating - the sights, sounds and geography of pre-war Berlin; brownshirts; the social milieu and attitudes of everyday German folks living with the combination of hope, fear, patriotism, terror and awe that Hitler must have inspired as he consolidated his dictatorial grip on the Germans; Jesse Owens humbling performance in the 1936 Olympics; and much more.

Is Paul Schumann a hero, an anti-hero or just plain villain? Deaver kindly leaves it to his readers to make their own decision. I'm sure you'll enjoy the trip as well as the ultimate destination.

While I may be reading much more into it than Deaver intended, I thought I'd give him kudos for what I think is an exceptionally clever title. "Garden of Beasts" could be said to be a loose translation of "Tiergarten" which is generally much more simply translated as "zoo". Much of the action in "Garden of Beasts" took place around Berlin's Tiergarten. For my money, I believe that Deaver was using the English translation to characterize the behaviour of his cast under the stress of war. See if you don't agree after you've read it.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss

"Prove that a uniform body with three mutually perpendicular axes of symmetry cannot rotate stably about the axis of intermediate length"

I remember it like it was yesterday. This was a question I faced on a second year classical mechanics exam. I got the question right, by the way. As a matter of fact, I scored a perfect 100% on the entire exam but it bothered me immensely that I should be able to prove something mathematically without having the foggiest inkling as to "why" it should be so at a much more fundamental level.

In fact, it troubled me so deeply that after I received my undergraduate degree in Physics, I declined to pursue any further education in the field and went on to a career in business and finance.

In "The Dancing Wu Li Masters", Gary Zukav has written a superb explanation as to why my lack of understanding was so normal and why I should have embraced that lack of understanding as opposed to running away from it. In very clear prose, completely devoid of the baffling language of mathematical equations, he has written a story for those of us interested in exploring the mind-expanding (nay, mind-blowing) discoveries of modern advanced physics and cosmology -quantum mechanics; black holes; time travel; entanglement; action at a distance; special and general relativity; the nuclear particle zoo; and much, much more.

I reveled in the discovery that even Einstein struggled with the notion that he would never be able to compare his mathematical models with the "real" mechanism. Indeed, he couldn't even imagine the meaning of such a comparison.

A magnificent blend of philosophy, eastern mysticism and modern physics, Zukav's "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" is perhaps best summarized by a single sentence from a New York Times Book Review:

"Stripped of mathematics, physics becomes pure enchantment ... "

While this isn't a book that would likely be accessible to someone without a foot already inside physics' door, it is a breathtaking, joyous revelation to people like myself who have that basic grounding and are looking to increase their knowledge.

What the heck, if I had read this in the 1970s instead of waiting until now ... who knows, my entire life and career path might have been changed.

Highly recommended.

Paul Weiss