" A Viet Cong Memoir" is an intriguing historical account of the "other side" of the Vietnam War. Mr. Truong was a member of the National Liberation Front, as opposed to an actual military guerilla. The media always referred to the NLF as "the political arm of the Viet Cong". That always struck me as a dark, typical Vietnam type mystery. With "VCM", the NLF has a human face to go with the mystery. Right from the outset, any Vietnam vet as myself must take a story told by a VC with several grains of salt! Mr. Troung is beyond a doubt engaging in a bit of revisionist history, painting the indigenous (Southern) Vietnamese NLF in a fairer light than the more taciturn, hard core Communist Northern invaders. (...) A decent awareness of the conflict is needed to fully appreciate the book. With all these constraints aside, "VCM" rates as 5 star history. This should be required reading for serious students of the War, almost on a par with Bernard Fall's epic "Street Without Joy". The reasons are many: Troung is an excellent writer, both at once engagingly formal yet abidingly down to earth. Well educated, well connected and intelligent, he was involved with the NLF from the early 1950s-the French era of the War. The reader senses Troung's commitment to Ho Chi Minh's cause right from the time he meets "Uncle Ho" as a student in Paris. I believe that he believed in Ho's aphorisms- "liberty sweet liberty", "victory great victory", etc. Since Troung was not a jungle guerilla, the military side of the conflict is not emphasized here. Four major aspects of the War are mentioned; these are the book's strengths. 1) The reader will understand how the nation of South Vietnam ran and eventually disintegrated. The author paints a grim picture of a string of venal, petty and authoritative Saigon regimes. Troung came from an upper class Southern family and was well placed to report accurately.He even does time in a dank Saigon prison. Typical for Vietnam, his wife springs him with a bribe! 2) For a foreigner, the author had an excellent (!) grasp of the American political scene. The Vietnamese must have seen the U.S. letting the War slip away long before we did. 3) "VCM" is the only place I have read a fair, balanced and nuanced version of the back room deals at the 5-year debacle known as "The Paris Peace Talks". There was actually an ebb and flow, a system of sorts. Did Henry Kissinger blink? Was he outfoxed? Or, as the author seems to suggest, were he and Nixon just out of maneuvering room? 4) Critically, Troung takes pains to paint the South Vietnam oriented NLF as a kinder, gentler "third way" between the real bad guys (the Saigon regimes and their American cronies) and the hard core Marxists from Hanoi. The NLF wanted to set up a quasi-independent government in Saigon that would allow for the obvious differences between the 2 Vietnams. The infighting was intense and the "good guys", if that's what they really were, got stiffed good and hard. I chose to take Troung at his word; other readers may disagree. As a finale, "VCM" offers a rare, poignant, and touching chapter on the refugees known as the "boat people". I used to think that "Vietnam" consisted of that remote, little dusty Engineer camp I lived in for a year. Then I started reading other folk's far (!) more earthy accounts of RVN. 30 years after coming home, I continue to be ASTOUNDED by how many stories and sides there are to this foggy and mysterious place. "VCM" makes some sense out of the mystery. Then again, this being Vietnam, it may deepen it! Night always did fall quickly over there.

"A Viet Cong Memoir" by Truong Nhu Tang (Former Minister of Justice) offers some rare glimpses into the Vietnam War. I haven't finished reading the book just yet, but did scan the last chapter to read the punch line. Truong Nhu Tang, fed up with the mismanagement of Vietnam, he 'lost the faith' and became disavowed, and fled to Paris, France in 1978. Albert Pham Nooc Thao, a close friend of the author and fellow Communist, was Chief of Security for South Vietnams armed forces when Diem was in power. Albert worked hard to institute programs in Vietnam to anger the civilians and make them more prone to blame the government and join the NLF. He also bird dogged and acted as Diem's bloodhound to locate officers and officials who didn't support Diem. What a Trojan Horse! I wonder how many other high ranking RVN officials also were on the other side, using their positions to spy, bring charges of corruption on the RVN gov't, get rid of competent officers and officials by McCarthyism (accusing them of being communists) and cause general confusion?

I read this book when it was first published and have used it as a reference as both a student and teacher of the Vietnam Conflict for many years. Before having traveled to Vietnam, this was one of the first sources I'd encountered that put a human face on a former enemy that other texts and media reports had failed to provide. The text gives the reader an excellent view of one man's perspective in the National Liberation Front and shows its readers an outlook rarely seen from an American political sentiment. Of particular interest to me were the author's personal accounts of espionage during the war and the physical and emotional affect American fire power had on the Vietnamese combatants.

I picked up this trilogy after reading, and loving, The Reality Dysfunction and The Neutronium Alchemist. Mindstar Rising is entertaining and moves along well, but comes nowhere near the scope, grandeur, and excellence of his later works. It is clearly a 'first' novel - it became rather tedious to receive a description of hair and clothing every time a character appeared in a scene. Hamilton does demonstrate, however, his knack for creating a rich and detailed world - one of the elements that makes The Neutronium Alchemist such an astounding work. The book is easy reading, and has plenty to keep the reader's interest, but I'd steer towards the latter series if you haven't already read them.

I had high hopes when I set out to read Peter F. Hamilton's MINDSTAR RISING, and I was not dissapointed in the least. The book is set in a "cyber-punk" world, which is described quite well by Hamilton, but does not linger, leaving the reader informed, but not bored. The plot does not immediatley pick up, but if you stick with it for a little bit you won't be sorry! The story is interesting and engrossing, and follows a logical (but not boring) course throughout the first half of the book. In the second half though, the book starts to broaden out, leaving readers guessing as to what will happen, as a sort of quasi-mystery. Absolutley engrossing, you won't want to put this book down!

This book is the debut novel by Hamilton, and it definitely kick starts the career of what seems to be one of SF's hottest new writers right now. The place is 21st Century England, in the days after the Global Warming, the Credit Crash, and the People's Socialistic Party (PSP). The protagonist is Greg Mandel, an ex-Army veteran of the Mindstar Battalion, a special force of people infused with a gland that enables them to "see" what other people feels (or alternatively, see into the future). He is hired by the company Event Horizon, to clear up a mysterious leak in the company. This investigation takes him to many places, and to the final confrontation with the villain, Kendric di Girolamo.

This book has it all: good characterization, a very thorough world-building, a good scientific base, and lots of suspense.

"The Jasmine Trade" by Denise Hamilton is a wonderfully engaging and readable first novel that introduces you to the twilight world of the disenfranchised rich teenage Asian immigrants in Los Angeles. It's haunting and gripping, and is a read that should not be missed!

While covering the carjacking-gone-wrong murder of 17 year old Marina Lu, Los Angeles reporter Eve Diamond, fortuitously uncovers a subculture she had little knowledge of: the parachute kids. These are the young teenage children of recent well to do Asian immigrants, who are living in this country with little or no parental supervision. While the parents are jetting all over the world for business reasons, the kids are expected to go to school regularly, get good grades, and lead exemplary lives. Of course, left to their own resources, the kids usually drift, and frequently into gangs. Eve smells a really good story here, and an award winning one at that. Through her contacts with the school board, and the Rainbow Coalition Center, Eve manages to talk to one of these 'parachute kids' and unexpectedly stumbles onto the diary of Marina Lu. Reading bits of the diary, Eve discovers that Marina believed that her much older fiance was two-timing her, and had resolved to discover the truth. Now, Eve cannot help but wonder if Marina's death was actually a murder made to look like a carjacking gone wrong. However before she can read Marina's diary properly from beginning to end, her car is broken into, and all her notes and Marina's diary is stolen. Was this a 'real' robbery or was recovering Marina's diary the primary objective? Suddenly Eve's world seems a lot darker. Why would the diary of a 17 year old be of any importance to anyone, unless it contained something really damaging to someone? And how did this person know that Eve had Marina's diary? Conscious of the fact that she may be in danger, Eve nonetheless refuses to give up her investigation into Marina's death, even if it means putting herself directly into harms' way. What Eve's eventually uncovers will haunt her and change her forever.

"The Jasmine Trade" is a really great read. And although for the first half of the book, the plot looks as if it is teetering a little between the subplots that dealt with Marina's death and her obsessive need to know what her fiance was up to, and the parachute kids, everything does come together, so that sticking it out really does pay off! Eve Diamond is a truly plucky and engaging heroine; her character makeup, equal parts investigative zeal to discover what really happened and to deliver some much needed justice, and her own inner sense of self loathing for all the manipulation she exercises in order to get a story, makes Eve really accessible to the reader. I also liked the manner in which Denise Hamilton intersperses bits about Eve's past with the present, so that we get to better understand Eve's character, and what motivates her. The storyline was an intriguing and riverting one, and Denise Hamilton's prose style was fresh and breezy, thus making this novel easy reading. I really enjoyed "The Jasmine Trade" and have no problem recommending it as an excellent read.

"The Jasmine Trade" is a suspense mystery written with a lot of depth by Denise Hamilton. It's about parachute kids in the San Gabriel Valley. Eve is a reporter working on an article about prostitution, but at the same time cracking a case about who killed 17-year-old Marina Lu, who was found dead in her car. Eve falls in love at the same time and is sometimes in the wrong place.
With many stories being connected as you read the book, it all falls into one place: How are all these parachute kids connected? When you read the fictitious "Eve" narrate it, it's as if the author were there.
"The Jasmine Trade" is a lot more complex than "The Outsiders," which is also about gangs, that I just had to read for my 7th grade English class. Children who probably have not read much might like "The Outsiders," because they have nothing better to compare it to, like "The Jasmine Trade." -- Maia L., L.A.

Los Angeles Times reporter, Eve Diamond, thought it was just another suburban carjacking gone wrong. Seventeen year old Marina Lu, on her way to order bridesmaid dresses for her upcoming wedding, was now lying dead in the shopping center parking lot, shot in the head. But as Eve looks first into the death, and then the life of this teenager, whose existence was filled with all the advantages that money, status and the upper class provided, she begins to discover that all was not as it seemed. The more she investigates, the deeper she plunges into the desperate lives of rich parachute kids, teenagers left alone in America to fend for themselves while their parents live and run lucrative businesses from Hong Kong, Asian gangs, and the "jasmine trade", smuggled immigrant Asians brought to America, and sold into prostitution. What started as just a sad, local crime story, has now turned into a deadly mission, and Eve vows to find the truth, no matter what the cost..... Turn off the phone and lock the door, Denise Hamilton's debut novel, The Jasime Trade, is about to keep you up reading, all night. This is an intricate thriller that grabs you from page one and never lets go. The plot is tight, tense and compelling, with vivid and riveting scenes that set you on the edge of your seat, and keeps you there. The writing is intelligent, crisp, and spare, and her well drawn characters, original, engaging and very believable. Complex and intriguing, Eve Diamond, is definitely one of the best new leading ladies, or men, to pop up on the mystery/thriller scene this year. It is obvious that Ms Hamilton did her homework, and her indepth knowledge of Los Angeles and the Asian community transports the reader to another world, and adds real credibility to the story. With a stunning climax and satisfying ending that ties up all the loose ends, The Jasmine Trade is hopefully the beginning of a marvelous new series starring a remarkable heroine, that shouldn't be missed. Be sure and put this novel at the top of your "must read" list!

Caroline Rhodes returns to Ascension Medical Center to help out an old friend, the ER's nurse manager. Under new corporate management, the hospital has changed dramatically since Caroline left, and not for the better. Chaos abounds on all levels and the political machinations within the hospital are enough to make you ill--not that you'd want to wind up at Ascension for treatment. The more we learn about some of the professionals at work, the more we fear them.

The cast of characters is extensive, and it is sometimes difficult to keep track of who's who and how they fit into the story. Also, past characters from earlier books make appearances that are a little unbalancing to the new reader. Because of that, I recommend reading the books in sequence. Had I started with the first book, I'm sure I would have had a better grasp of some of the situations and better understood the references.

Caroline is a sympathetic and believable heroine, and the nurse's perspective is refreshing and insightful. Recommended for those who enjoy a lighter, not-so-graphic, mystery/suspense story in a medical setting with characters who come across as old friends.

Mary Welk's third book in the Caroline Rhodes,RN mystery series is an interesting look at what really happens behind closed doors in an ER. The characters are nicely developed and the pacing allows this book to move right along. Welk just keeps getting better.

I love Mary V Welk's books and this one is no exception. This time nurse Caroline Rhodes is back in her old home town of Chicago. When she again stumbles across a body, her friends from Rhineburg and her family help her to catch the murderer. If you are looking for really wonderful characters that you look forward to visiting again and again then this is the book for you. The mystery is good and the characters are so real you feel like you know them. Be sure to read the first 2 books A Deadly Little Christmas and Something Wicked in the Air.

John Steele Gordon is an excellent writer, one whom I have enjoyed very much in the pages of American Heritage and who wrote a nifty history of Wall Street called "The Great Game."

This book, "Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt" is a good, if brief, overview of the fiscal history of the American government. It is somewhat misnamed, since the National Debt serves as a background and tie in to each period of fiscal history studied.

The author does a superb job of explaining Alexander Hamilton's establishment of our financial, banking, debt and money system. Here is a woefully under appreciated founder explained succinctly and whose brilliance and indispensability are brought forth by Gordon.

Descriptions of attitudes towards and major changes in financial policy and tools follow. Gordon covers the major aspects: the struggle over the Second National Bank, Jackson's paying off the debt (the only time the US Gov't has been debt free), Lincoln and Chase's tax, greenback and bond finance of the Civil War, the long fight to establish the income tax, the fight over high marginal rates and an efficient system of taxation, and the change in view in the last century from one that deficits and debt were something to be controlled to our current sorry state of view whereby no one worries about much about deficits anymore.

Debt, when properly used, has allowed us to primarily wage wars. It was retired in times of peace. We face an interesting time now, when debt as a percentage of GDP is much higher than it has been in most peacetimes. This raises the question that if we have to fight a truly massive and long war in the future, will we have the capacity to borrow what we need (based on historic statistics, it is a question well worth pondering).

Gordon finishes the book with a polemic against the political culture that has lost its way in terms of providing an efficient and fair and economically sound system of taxation and the willingness to moderate the nation's debt.

This is a good and interesting book. Anyone looking for a succinct telling of the development of our government's fiscal structure will appreciate this gem.

Just two years ago, John Steele Gordon's book on the history of the U.S. federal debt would have seemed dated, even though it was published in 1997. After more than twenty consecutive years of operating in the red, the U.S. federal government had not only erased its annual deficits and began paying down the debt, but surpluses were projected over the next ten years.

This is no longer the case. A tax cut, the war on terrorism, and a slowdown in the economy have combined to push the U.S. government's outlays above its revenues. They have also made this book -- "Hamilton's Blessing" -- relevant again.

Gordon's book is two things: 1) a basic history describing the twists and turns of U.S. fiscal policy over the last two hundred-plus years and 2) a political tract condemning the latest turn U.S. fiscal policy has taken since the Great Society.

By combining the two, Gordon seeks to show that the most recent practice of U.S. fiscal policy -- that of habitually running deficits in peacetime -- is not only unprecedented in U.S. history, but also, more importantly, unsupported by any sound theory of economics.

"Hamilton's Blessing" is well-written and interesting. The book is only slightly marred by a lack of detail in some areas. How exactly does a large public debt hurt your average citizen and by how much? We never find out.

Gordon also should have kept his own political bent out of the book. Among other things, he spends three pages in a less than 200-page book detailing Jack Kemp's personal and political history, including his football career. All very interesting, but not really relevant to the history of the U.S. debt.

This book is detailed, but easy to read, giving a good background on how our national debt came to be what it is today. Teh book also covers several of the more popular schools of thought on economics, specifically the teachings of John Maynard Keynes, the namesake of Keynesian Economics. I recommend this book to anyone who has ever questioned our government's inability to pay down the national debt as that debt is known as "Hamilton's Blessing."

This was when it was issued an excellent reference for Pern, but it has since been very dated by the publication of books such as Masterharper of Pern and Skies of Pern. And the information in it is extremely shallow compared to some of the excellent wesites that are available online. I would be delighted if Jody Lynn Nye and Annne McCaffrey would sit down and incorporate some of the work Pern fans have been doing in the interim years and make this a truly authoritative Pern reference book.

I found this book good reading, for the most part. Like any "instructional" type companion book for a series, it can be dry at times...but it's still a good read! I found out some things that the series books had left out, or didn't explain too thouroughly. The illustrations were really great, too! My perception of just how big Ramoth was definitely changed after I read this book! All in all...not bad, if you're a McCaffrey/Pern fan. Worth buying!

Do you love Anne McCaffrey's Pern books? Did you ever wonder exactly what a bubbly pie was or how klah really tastes? Want the recipe? It's all in this book. I took this home and kicked my family out of the kitchen for hours. Klah is fabulous if you like coffee, cinnamon, and chocolate. Do you want to know what the Rukbat system looks like? There's a map of Rukbat here. And what are those bloody threads made of anyway? And how do the dragonriders predict where they'll fall next? It's all right here in this cover-to-cover learning experience

This is a large text in time series analysis that is designed for graduate students as the author acknowledges in his preface. It deals primarily with the theory and the tools rather than providing practical applications. It does not require a Ph.D. but does require a fair amount of mathematical sophistication that comes from advanced courses in probability and statistics. There are many good books at this level. This one has some unique features. It covers the traditional ARIMA models that can be found in most texts and uses the operator notation that Box and Jenkins introduced. It adds vector autoregressions which is fairly recent material. Spectral analysis (the frequency domain approach)is also covered and asymptotic theory is presented. Linear systems (more common to econometric time series than in the standard statistical books) is covered. Topics not commonly covered in competitor texts include nonstationary cases (both univariate and multivariate)with unit roots to the characteristic equation, Bayesian approaches, heteroscedastic models including the ARCH models and the topic of cointegration originally developed by Clive Granger. The book is loaded with references to the literature and is slanted towards methods useful in econometrics. Other good books at this level include Brockwell and Davis (1987), Fuller (1976), Anderson (1971), Harvey (1981) and Shumway and Stoffer (2000). Good texts solely in the frequency domain include Bloomfeld (1976), Priestley (1981), Koopmans (1974) and Brillinger (1981). Box, Jenkins and Reinsel (1994) provides practical applications using the Box-Jenkins time domain approach.

As an economist,before taking PhD lectures, I used to think that this book was too complicated. It is not for undergraduate students. Once you acquire some level in mathematics, this book becomes the best reference for time series econometricians. It covers a wide array of themes, the text is clear and understandable, even if, from time to time, you get lost in the mathematical explanations (but it's not the usual). I particularly liked the non-stationary chapters. The spectral analysis is a little bit confusing and there is no non-parametric section. I think this is one of the best books in the field. Mathematicians will find it extremely clear and graduate economists understandable. "Time series Analysis" it's an unavoidable book for those seeking to understand specialised papers.

This is really the best book of econometrics I have ever had. It is extensive in any single topic of time series. It provides excellent statistics background and it can be easily understood through the proposed examples that keep track of an increasing level of difficulty (from very easy to tough). I highly reccomend it to any graduate student in econ and to those undergraduate that want to move their first steps into this field.

Pretty amazing -- David Hamilton takes some pictures of some very attractive subjects, in extremely attractive backgrounds, with extremely expensive equipment, and manages to make them look worse than the worst of my holiday photos. Boring, self-conscious... basically, not worth a look. If you like the subject matter, I highly recommend Jock Sturges (for some very laid-back, pretty pictures) or Sally Mann (for some slightly more disturbing overtones.) But skip Hamilton, he's a waste of paper

This collection of Hamilton's work contains bland landscape photography that would fit the formulas of the Sierra Club desk calender; bland images of young girls in the same poses we've seen dozens of times in his other work, saying nothing new and with all the personality of a jeans ad; and self-conscious photos of some Beautiful People that look like they were intended for ads in a fashion magazine. Of course, none of this should be surprising considering that most of Hamilton's work is blatantly commercial and self-indulgent, but some of his earlier books -- Sisters, Private Collection, and so on -- contained genuinely unique, well-composed, and evocative pictures. (Age of Innocence was as boring to me as this book.) The only images that worked for me in Place in the Sun were the photos of flowers, which are very pretty. Seeing one photo of a "native" couple titled "The Noble Savage," and another of a young woman holding handfuls of fruit at crotch level titled "The Fruits of Love" (or something similar) gave me a laugh. For some reason, Hamilton has never gotten over his addiction to silly quotes and captions that cheapen his images. I would certainly prefer that he let them speak for themselves, but then the viewer might have a chance to experience his own response to them, rather than being directed by Hamilton to Hamilton's own narcissistic fantasy.

This book is absolutely brimming with gorgeous pictures. I bought it the minute I finished looking at it for the first time four years ago. All photographs are tastefully done and convey a sense of wonder at what God has put here on this earth for us all to enjoy. You absolutely have to have this book!!!! It is stunning!!!!!

This dreadful anthology was once the standard English edition of Plato. I had to assign it when I taught courses on Plato because there was nothing else. Many of the translations are bad. Even the decent ones often are quite old, and their flowery Victorian diction is off-putting. The collection isn't complete, as it leaves out a number of important dialogues from the Platonic corpus. And the introductions are uniformly ghastly; the editors have little understnding of philosophy, and keep saying horrible things like "There's a lot of boring logic-chopping in this dialogue, but at least the personality of Socrates is engaging." There is no longer any need to be subject to the tyranny of Hamilton & Cairns! There is now a far better edition, with excellent introductions, excellent translations, and including all the dialogues. It's the COMPLETE WORKS from Hackett Pub., edited by John Cooper. It will be the standard edition from now on. Go get that one! Don't get this one!

Yes, I think Plato's philosophy is one of the most despicable things unleashed on this Earth. His idea that this world we live in is only semi-real has lead to most of the bad philosphy in recorded history. Only a few philosphers have escaped from under his glare. It's most ironic that one of those is his most famous student: Aristotle.
However, as a lover of knowledge and a student of philosophy, I realize the tremendous debt owed to Plato. First, he understood how imprtant it was to record his ideas. Socrates did not and for this the world is almost assuredly the worst for it. Secondly, he was and absolutely amazing writer. His ability to put his ideas forth in a lucid manner that anyone can uderstand is amazing. Thirdly, he was the first philosopher who devised a full system of knowledge. He wrote on metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, politics and aesthetics.
It is further unfortunate that this text has become the standard by which philosphy students must study Plato. The text is rigid, and as an earlier reviewer noted, Hamilton's intros suck. It is ridiculous to think of her as a serious Platonic scholar. But the Cooper text is much harder to come by, and the Hamilton is required in most courses on Plato. If you have the means, secure yourself a copy of both.

I have read several of the translations of Plato's dialogues by different scholars... this is the best one that I have come across. Granted Ms. Hamilton's introductions are a little sparce, but that leaves the reader to form a better opinion... not one jaded. This edition is one of the most complete volumes available... where Letters, Menexenus, Lesser Hippias and Ion are found with a rather extensive index and the standard numbering lines from the Greek text.

We have meaningful translations, translations of what Plato was trying to say in todays English language... I know that over time languages grow and evolve but here we read the dialogues like a short story full of life and viable.

The translations in this volume are from: Lane Cooper, F.M. Cornford, W.K.C. Guthrie, R. Hackforth, Michael Joyce, Benjamin Jowett, L.A. Post, W.H.D. Rouse, Paul Shorey, J.B.Skemp, A.E. Taylor Hugh Tredennick, W.D. Woodhead, and J. Wright.

For being a one volume set, this is about as complete as it gets.

I read Lyn Hamilton because I like mysteries with an archaeolical background. Her three books so far have made that part interesting, however she lacks the 'good story' ability. I loose interest in her characters. This story was too hard to believe. Anyone who would just fly off to New York, then Mexico and then Peru after the loosing the profit capability of her business (believe me I know the cost of one-way airfares) has to have an income that makes the reasons was going off on this jaunt seem ridiculous. All the characters were set up well enough, but very little they did seemed real. Example: the wife of the customes inspector from Peru with three births to her body being able to attract a very successful French smuggler and be able to wear the 'teen' styles of barely a silk slip. Her endings are neat, but that's fine with me. It suits the genre.

THE MOCHE WARRIOR is the third entry in Lyn Hamilton's Lara McClintoch series. I read the first two, THE XIBALBA MURDERS and THE MALTESE GODDESS, several years ago. I was lukewarm on the former, but somewhat disappointed in the latter. Sufficiently disappointed that I had no particular inclination to purchase this third book. Finally, though, time triumphed over memory. Recollections of the reasons for my disenchantment with THE MALTESE GODDESS faded to the point where I decided to give THE MOCHE WARRIOR a shot. I'm glad I did. While I will agree with others who find it a bit incongruous for a character to just take off at the drop of a hat on a lengthy and costly expedition to Mexico and Peru (anyone else ever notice how money is rarely a consideration for fictional characters, whether in movies, TV, or books), it's hard to say how any of us would react if we thought our life was in imminent danger, and credit cards do make it possible to postpone costs. Nevertheless, I found the plot engaging enough to keep me turning the pages despite the improbabilities. To be fair, what work of fiction doesn't have some improbabilities in it? Further, I found the setting interesting (the arid Peruvian coast) and the archeology intriguing. All in all, I enjoyed this book. More than I expected to, in fact. As a result, I already have the next book in the series, and I'm giving THE MOCHE WARRIOR four stars. If you like nice little mysteries, consider giving this one a try.

Antique dealer, Lara McClintoch learns that revenge does not pay when she spitefully outbids her ex husband for a box of artifacts then discovers that someone is willing to murder for the contents. This archaeological mystery takes us to Peru where connections to grave robbers, the black market and drug runners place Lara in danger. The plot is tight with an assortment of potential bad guys that kept me guessing at the connections. But though Hamilton's books have exotic settings, her writing doesn't really give me the feeling that I've been there--and I have been to several of the countries she writes about. That said, I enjoyed the book anyway and laughed out loud at her wrap-up with the ex in the ending.