The day Melvin arrives at Nick's store, a riot breaks out but no one is seriously hurt. That night at the Mayflower, a maid notices a fire in Melvin's room, puts it out, and sees that the occupant died. With Nick's urgings, the police consider murder with a member of SOS as the prime suspect. However, Nick remembers what Melvin told him about the index in his book containing his most likely killer.

The third "Nothing Satisfies Like a Good Cigar" mystery is an entertaining police procedural that fans will enjoy because, though no longer a cop, Nick is a key member of the investigative team. The story line works because Nick and his cohorts, especially Professor Woolley, seem genuine so that when the star begins his own inquiries they seem real. Though a red herring or two add little to the plot except trying to unnecessarily fool the reader, UP IN SMOKE is a superb tale, but my spouse still needs to step outside when he puffs on that cigar.

Harriet Klausner

My only disappointment was the absence of Anthony Flew's famous (and much anthologized) essay, "Theology and Falsification", but this is only a cavil. There is always room for one more custard pie, as Orwell wrote. Oh, and it would be nice if this book were printed instead of photocopied.

But, as this book persuasively shows, the early 20th Century provided no respite from Church-sponsored evils. Many think the Catholic Churched committed "mere" errors of omission during World War II, such as maintaining close relationships with the Nazi Party in Germany, and merely looking away from the horrors of the Holocaust. But it was much worse than that. As Williams shows in albeit simplistic terms, the Vatican took money from scoundrels and devils, assisted Mussolini and his henchmen in both taking and holding power, and more actively worked with fascists in Germany and elsewhere for the singleminded quest to obtain sufficient funds to continue its lavish ways.

Every Catholic should read this.

And then revolt.

From the perspective of a programmer who hasn't touched basic since he had a Sinclair Spectrum, I found this book got me up to speed reasonbly quickly. However I suspect it will attract a fairly small audience - a non programmer would find it too terse to be a good learning book, and an experienced VB programmer would probably be better off with a book specific to the environment they're using (eg, ASP) because this book does not cover any enviroment specific objects, and VBScript has no enviroment specific functions. It does however cover the filesystem objects and the dictionary object, which is handy.

Every now and then I get frustrated with the book when I can't find a function that I want, but then I usually discover that the function doesn't exist in VBScript, which is really such a trivial language that a pocket reference can cover it more or less completely.

Chapter 1 provides an insightfull and largely untold discussion on the design and development of the H-bodies from 1971 up to 1975. This chapter also includes many interesting illustrations.

The remaining chapters are devoted to service procedures, which can also be found in other H-body service manuals.