A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore #22 ***

From Amazon: For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. Though security cameras catch nothing, Charlie swears he saw an impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit standing beside Rachel as she died. When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something's up. Along comes Minty Fresh—the man in green—to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. While Charlie's employees, Lily the Goth girl and Ray the ex-cop, mind the shop, and two enormous hellhounds babysit, Charlie attends to his dangerous soul-collecting duties, building toward a showdown with Death in a Gold Rush–era ship buried beneath San Francisco's financial district.

06/04/07 Another fun read from Christopher Moore. I enjoyed the characters alot.

Free Fire by C. J. Box #21 ****

From Amazon: Pickett, having been fired as a game warden, is working as foreman of his father-in-law's ranch when Wyoming's loose-cannon governor, Spencer Rulon, reinstates him--not to work his old district but to investigate, without official support, a crime in Yellowstone National Park. A lawyer has found a legal loophole that allows him to kill four campers and walk away scot-free, enraging Rulon. (A remote, uninhabited part of the park, soon dubbed the "Zone of Death," has murky jurisdiction and no residents to form a jury.) But, sure as Pickett is hard on government vehicles, there's something even more sinister than a twisted legal mind behind the murders.

05/21/07 This turned out to be pretty good. I happened to take a trip up to Jackson Hole while reading this and even though it takes place in Yellowstone still was cool getting the real feel for the setting.

Interesting and thought provking.

Boy Meets Girl by Meg Cabot #20 ***

From Amazon:This story unfolds, like 2002's The Boy Next Door, entirely through e-mails, journals, instant messages, phone mail, deposition transcripts, notes scribbled on menus, to-do lists and other hallmarks of a modern girl's life. Kate Mackenzie, an idealistic HR representative at the New York Journal, has just been forced by her evil boss, Amy Jenkins, to fire Ida Lopez, the wildly popular dessert cart lady at the company cafeteria. Ida bakes delectable goodies, but she won't serve them to priggish Stuart Hertzog, the paper's legal counsel, who happens to be engaged to Amy, known as the T.O.D. (tyrannical office despot) to Kate and her best friend and co-worker Jen. Sweet Ida sues for wrongful termination, and Stuart charges his younger brother, Mitch, with handling this delicate matter. But Mitch actually cares about justice more than his brother's bitchy fiancee (he's only working at the family firm at his sick father's request), and he quickly confounds Kate's expectations with his Rocky and Bullwinkle tie and "tie-him-to-the-bed" good looks. When the T.O.D. tries to lay the blame for her HR blunder on Kate, Mitch goes to the furthest reaches of lawyerly chivalry to save his ladylove.

05/11 Laugh out loud funny!

Paris Trout by Pete Dexter #19 ****

From Amazon: In this novel of social drama, a casual murder in the small Georgia town of Cotton Point just after World War II and the resulting court case cleave open the ugly divisions of race and class. The man accused of shooting a black girl, a storekeeper named Paris Trout, has no great feeling of guilt, nor fear that the system will fail to work his way. Trout becomes an embarrassment to the polite white society that prefers to hold itself high above such primitive prejudice. But the trial does not allow any hiding from the stark reality of social and racial tensions.

05/09 I enjoyed this book and couldn't put it down. A littl on the dark side.