People are voluntarily dying before their time in California. Some call it assisted suicide when cancer or heart disease or painful old age make the quality of life unbearable. Others say it is murder, that no-one has the right to help others take their own life.
Added by: KundAlini | Karma: 1594.10 | Fiction literature | 21 April 2011
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The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud
by Ben Sherwood
Not even death can keep two brothers from meeting to play ball: it sounds like a sentimental TV movie, doesn't it? Actually, Sherwood's second novel (after The Man Who Ate the 747) is warmhearted but not maudlin, exploring the bonds between the living and the dead and the lengths to which we'll go for love.
Meet Della Carmichael, owner of a cooking school in Santa Monica, California, and star of a new cable cooking show. When Della enters a baking competition to promote her show, she soon finds the cakes aren't the only things getting iced... To help boost ratings for her show, humble host Della reluctantly agrees to enter a televised cake competition sponsored by Reggi-Mixx, even though the company's owner, Regina Davis, is an old college nemesis. When Della hears that competitive pastrymaking is a blood sport, she doesn't take it literally--until she finds someone drowned in a mixing bowl full of cake batter.
Returning from a foreign holiday, Hamish Macbeth is worried because he senses a dark cloud of evil hanging over the Highland village of Lochdubh. He learns that a newcomer, Catriona Beldame, is regarded as a witch and various men have been seen visiting her. Hamish himself is charmed by her until he finds out she has been supplying dangerous potions.
Gentle by name, gentle by nature.Everyone in the sleepy Scottish town of Lochdubh adores elderly Mrs. Gentle - everyone but Hamish Macbeth, that is.Hamish thinks the gentle lady is quite sly and vicious, and the citizens of Lochdubh think he is overly cranky. Perhaps it's time for him to get married, they say.But who has time for marriage when there's a murder to be solved? When Mrs. Gentle dies under mysterious circumstances, the town is shocked and outraged.Chief Detective Inspector Blair suspects members of her family, but Hamish Macbeth thinks there's more to the story, and begins investigating the truth behind this lady's gentle exterior.
