Blue Genes

[Editor's Note: The following is a combined review with STAR STRUCK.] -- One can't imagine a better reading of the fifth and sixth installments of the mysteries featuring Scottish-born journalist Kate Brannigan. Actress Laura Bratton inserts a perfect blend of humor, character, and very human frustration in these two novels featuring a Manchester-based private eye whose troubles mount with every chapter. In BLUE GENES, Kate is out to foil a pair of memorial-stone scam artists when her skills are called on to defend the professional honor of a Scottish punk rock band and to solve the murder of an obstetrician involved in an illegal procedure for providing lesbian couples with children. In STAR STRUCK, while working as bodyguard to a popular soap opera star, Kate finds her friends arrested for all sorts of crimes, and the woman she was hired to guard is implicated in the murder of a famous astrologer. The stories are clever and engaging, and Bratton successfully captures the northern English characters. S.E.S. (c) AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine