Will appeal to: survivors and their family and friends.

This book is excellent reading for both the layperson and the academician.

For example, "The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori" is a worthwhile excursion into Barnard territory. This time it's to Bronte country in Yorkshire (one of his favorites), more specifically to Haworth and its nearby community of Ashworth. A corpse is discovered in the boot of a car parked at the Haworth Tandoori restaurant. The body is clad only in underwear, there's no identification, and shows signs of grim mutilation. And it's in the jurisdiction of Detective Constable Charlie Peace and Detective Superintendent Mike Oddie, two policemen extraordinaire we've met in previous Barnard works.

The duo finds the body eventually leads them to Ashworth, a collection of artists, wannabes, and hangers-on where a young Irishman Declan O'Hearn had come to seek employment and has now disappeared. The body is identified as his.

Barnard is known for his stylish twists, his clever plot designs, certainly his way with words. His prose is generally salted with plenty of creative expressions and humor--in short, never a dull minute--yet at the same time, he is able to sustain a gripping suspense that makes it difficult to put the book down. Don't be surprised at the surprises, and Barnard knows how to deal them out and not put off the reader. He is a master at characterization and young Declan is well drawn, as, indeed, are his other characters.

Peace and Oddie are able to unravel this puzzle, mainly with good police work and with some luck, too. Along the way, we meet members of the Ashworth community who are clearly not who--or what--they seem, and the revelations of this mystery unfold, logically, plausibly, and with much certainty. In police procedurals, perhaps there is nothing new under the sun, but in this one, Barnard takes his plot designs and strong characterization and presents a novel well-worth one's time. Barnard's a good writer and in the course of his some 30 novels gives us a smart taste of Yorkshire and the Bronte moors. "The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori" is a delectable buffet!

(Billyjhobbs@tyler.net)

In the British town of Haworth lies Ashford Farm which has many cottages located on the property. The residents of the farm have little to do with the townsfolk and viceversa. The only commonly known fact about the farm community is that everyone seems to have a cult-like worship of the owner, renowned painter Ranulf Byatt, an egomaniac.

A waiter going off shift from his job at the Haworth Tandoori finds a body in the back of his car. Officer Charlie Peace and his superior Detective Superintendent Mike Odie investigate and soon trace the corpse back to Declan O'Hearn, a former assistant to Ranulf. Through flashbacks, the audience learns about Declan's arrival at the farm and his growing dissatisfaction with the blind worship that elevated Ranulf to a God-like figure. As the investigators continue their digging, they find depravity that shocks even long time police officials like Mike and Charlie.

The mantle place in Robert Barnard's home looks like a who's who of mystery awards. His latest work, THE CORPSE AT THE HAWORTH TANDOORI, substantiates that he deserves his Nero Wolf, Anthony, Agatha, and MacCavity awards. No one will guess the ending or the revelations that keep the audience constantly in shock wondering what will happen next. The superb plot is brilliantly executed, especially since he leaves everyone sans the police officers as prime suspects. The audience will reread this novel on numerous ocassions to savor the special Brnard touch.

Harriet Klausner

Wheeler begins his book by describing how stars form, how they evolve in response to gravity, how they ignite, how they burn, and eventually how they die. This is a logical introduction, since virtually all the examples of cosmic catastrophes involve stars in one form or another. Like people, though, the life of each star is unique - and the end times are very different. Wheeler does an excellent job of describing the negative feedback process that stabilizes solar activity. If the star generates too much heat it expands. This expansion reduces the temperature, and throttles back on the rate of nuclear fusion. If the star cools down it contracts, and the contraction heats it up again, keeping the rate of fusion at a remarkably constant level for long periods of time during the stars life.

Much of Wheeler's text is actually about how stars evolve. This is important because to understand their deaths, you need to understand how they are born and how they evolve over their lifetimes. Their deaths are frequently the most interesting parts of the story because they are often involved with the catastrophes that are the book's principal thesis. While I bought the book because of its discussion about cosmic catastrophes, I found it valuable for its descriptions of stellar evolution alone. This includes a nice description of the "solar-neutrino" problem as well as a nice explanation of the red-giant phase, and especially the last stages during the life of a massive star that explodes in a super nova.

The foundational understanding of the basics of stellar evolution makes it easier to follower Wheeler as he takes the reader on a tour of the major players in cosmic catastrophes: white dwarfs, super novae (of many different types), neutron stars, black holes, and gamma-ray bursts. Wheeler's descriptions of these phenomena (to the extent that modern science understands them) are among the best I've seen in a popular science textbook. There is also a smattering of discussion about the origin of the universe in the Big Bang, and some interesting speculation about time (and space) travel using black holes.

In any book dealing with modern cosmology and astronomy there are inevitable discussions about the nature of space and time and how they fit together with Einstein's theory of general relativity. Most such books have at least one figure showing a funnel-shaped construct with grid lines converging as they swoop into the tapering end where the black hole resides. Wheeler uses lots of such diagrams. However, I think he does a better job than most at helping the reader understand what the diagrams illustrate. More importantly, he helps the reader understand what the diagrams do not illustrate, and their limitations (he dispels some common misperceptions about these sorts of figures). I especially enjoyed Wheeler's explanations about how one might (with the application of the appropriate mental acrobatics) use the diagrams to actually envision what is really going on in our multi-dimensional world.

Another thing I liked about Wheeler's book is the clear and frequent illustrations. For the most part the author has anticipated those places where prose just cannot quite complete the mental picture. When this happens there is inevitably a well-constructed diagram that finishes the concept and makes things clear. There was one exception, however. Figure 7.3 really needs to have an arrow or circle marking the location of SN 1987A. [I'm pretty sure I found it, but the exposure changes between the photographs, and so I'm not quite sure. It would have been nice to have the author's help in preventing a false identification.]

Reading this book one gets the sense that even though it is a qualitative description of astronomy (there are no equations) Wheeler is not over simplifying. His discussion of super novae, for example, lists many classes and describes theoretical uncertainties that other authors gloss over or ignore all together. Of course there is much more detail to super novae than what is in Wheeler's book. But at the qualitative level Wheeler leaves the reader understanding that there are many classifications of super novae, that some of the boundaries between classifications are not always so clear cut, and that we still don't know a lot about how some types form, and how other types explode. These are concepts that other popular science textbooks don't always convey. I think the only thing missing from the chapters on super novae is a table that summarizes all the different types and some of their descriptive identifiers.

Unlike some popular science texts, Wheeler devotes quite a bit of time describing the evolution of binary stars, which play an important role in some of the greatest cosmic catastrophes. I think he does an especially good job of qualitatively describing accretion disks, and how they fit in the context of mass transfer in binary systems. It's this mass transfer that is ultimately involved in some of the most spectacular catastrophes in the sky.

Overall, this is a great book. If you enjoy astronomy I'm sure you will find it satisfying and informative. It's just the sort of book to enjoy on a vacation, or after a grueling day at the office.

In these days after WWII, England is no longer the place the young men left when they went away to fight. The mining industry has been nationalized, and even Comerford's old slapdash efforts at opening up its shallow coal deposits are about to be reopened, with a flood of new faces coming in to operate the new machinery. The men who went away, of course, aren't those who came back: Jim Tugg, the hired man at the Hollins farm, with daring exploits as a paratrooper; Chad Wedderburn, the pacifist classics master who spent years in guerilla fighting; even Charles Blunden, son of Selwyn Blunden of Harrow, fought all the way across North Africa and Sicily.

Expatriates from all over Europe are common enough, even ex-POWs who still slip and say 'Heil Hitler!' if they forget. (And get beaten up, maybe, by somebody whose brother died in a Stalag.) Helmut Schauffler, though, has been asking to be murdered by going far beyond that.

Gerd Hollins had lost her entire family in the concentration camps. Haunted by memories of horror that won't stay suppressed, she asked her husband to hire Helmut, because if she could learn to see one German as a human being, it would help her to let go of her nightmares. Unfortunately, Helmut is a creep - an actual Nazi who enjoys psychological torment (though he's not stupid enough to try it in front of her husband or hired man). When he's fired and takes a job at the quarry, he still harasses her in a slimy way, while causing discord everywhere else he goes.

Sergeant Felse isn't surprised when Helmut finally turns up floating in the brook, head bashed in, although he's less than thrilled that his 13-year-old son Dominic found the corpse. Despite George's best efforts, Dominic gets interested in the case, especially since his classics master is a suspect.