excellent legal tale with a timely theme at its center: how drugs are brought to market. a foreign takeover of a small pharmaceutical company offers insights into the origin and importance of trademarks and the fda approval process. smooth, confident narrative tone and engaging characters.

john grisham style with john. very tough to put this book down. keep up the rachel gold series.

Real life lawyer Kahn does a good job with his female lawyer character, Rachel Gold. Her raunchy friend, Benny, keeps Ms. Gold from taking herself too seriously. For people who know St. Louis, the book is full of local references...you always know where Rachel is about town. I had several good laughs in this book, in my opinion, the best of Kahn's Rachel Gold books.

Michael Kahn's Rachel Gold legal mysteries are pure gold waiting to be discovered and while this latest effort falls short of its predecessor, the brilliant "Bearing Witness," it is an intricately plotted, clever novel well worth the read. Yes, it starts slowly, but from about a third of the way through to the end, don't plan on putting it down. Gold, spunky, sensitive, brilliant and with a nose for things that aren't as they seem, has Angela Green, a famous woman in jail for killing her husband, as a client. She is defending a Son of Sam case concerning a book her client is writing but a quick delving into the circumstances of the trial for her case suggests to Rachel that her client is innocent of murder. Suddenly the case she is supposed to be on becomes a backdrop as Rachel pursues hitherto unfollowed clues and inconsistencies through the murky waters of St. Louis politics and the even murkier waters of the porn industry. A lawyer could drown in such waters very easily, but our girl not only stays afloat, she emerges from them triumphant -- and even works out a thorny romantic problem of her own. Read it. Better yet, read all the Rachel Gold books and then read it; you'll appreciate it even more with such grounding.

The whole Rachel Gold series is great. This was a page turner until the very end like all of the others in the series. The plot is extrememly well crafted. The authors use of humor was excellent. Love this series would like to see many more.

St. Louis attorney Michael Green divorced his wife Angela so he could marry the young and beautiful Samantha. Before that could happen, Michael was killed and Angela was put on trial for the crime. There was enough evidence for the jury to convict her and Angela was sentenced to forty years at the Chillicothe Correctional Center.

Seven years into her sentence and six months before her autobiography is to come out, a Son of Sam claim is made on behalf of Samantha's son. Local attorney Rachel Gold is hired to represent Angela in that lawsuit, but the lawyer goes one step further. She finds enough information in the trial transcript to question Angela's guilt and she decides to see if she can uncover proof to get Angela's verdict overturned. She doesn't realize what a Pandora's box she will be opening by taking that action.

The latest installment in the Rachel Gold series is totally enthralling and believable. The plot is so complex and multi-layered that the audience won't have a clue whom the truly guilty party is until the author chooses to reveal it. TROPHY WIDOW is a must read for anyone who likes a top rate legal thriller.

Harriet Klausner

...but if you can't suspend your disbelief a little bit, what the heck kind of mystery reader are you? The concept of this book was extremely intriguing and held my attention to the end. I thought the characters were excellent, and I hope to see some of Rachel Gold's supporting cast in her future adventures. All in all, one heckuva page-turner.

As a longtime lover of legal procedure-detective stories, expecially with lawyers as heroines, it has amazed me that Michael Kahn's Rachel Gold novels have not enjoyed more general support. They are well written, loaded with authentic material and have truly puzzling mysteries to unravel. Throw in an irresistible, spunky main character and it's quite a nice package (as is Rachel Gold). While the fifth and so far final novel, Sheer Gall, is Kahn's best, Grave Designs is the start of it all. And a fine start it is. A complex story with a plot that reaches back to Colonial New England and a brainy heroine struggling with her own emotions and a nefarious criminal organization are the basis of the absorbing story. Plus there is one light touch that I just love. Rachel greets an old law-school friend with a flip "You mean you made bail on the morals charge?" and he replies "The sheep would never testify against me!" Ah, insouciance. Ah, breezy dialogue.

Rachel Gold is cool. Tho a lawyer, she spends most of her time 'detecting' along with her mother and a lifelong friend, Benny, a rotund fancier of foods and females. They are all working on freeing her sister Ann from a murder rap. Good book, a little heavy on the sexual inuendo and 'out' uendo too. Lots of plots, counter plots, dead ends and runarounds. It doesn't fully resolve until almost the final page.

Pat

On second thought, she really didn't solve the mystery. Our Rachel did find out why someone was murdered, but didn't really find out who done it. In the less than clever denouement the killer more or less walks up to Ms. Gold and admits the crime. The author can't think of a way for our sleuth to solve the mystery? You sort of get the feeling that Michael Kahn put the names of all the characters on a dart board and chose the one hit by his flying dart to be the big baddie. I don't know if I care for this random selection technique. Kahn's Rachel Gold books have gotten good reviews, so maybe this just isn't one of his better ones. The main characters are fairly interesting, and the male author seems to do a good job of being able to write about a female protagonist, but all in all this book is not very fast paced.

Rachel Gold is Everywoman of today! She is smart, witty, shrewd, career-minded, independent and clever. Michael A. Kahn does an excellent job of embodying a successful female lawyer, and can keep a reader captivated. I was never much into mysteries, but I picked up this book on a whim and when I got home, I couldn't put it down! So many twists and turns, plenty of drama and quite a few laughs. Highly recommended!

My opinion: Reused contemporary ideas about one aspect of good conversation. The author fills his book with far too many examples, and the examples that are given are summarized in points that are almost common-sensical. Supposedly a psychological book focusing on the author's years of research on the subject, but its apparent lack of APA citations downplay that notion. Wishy-washy.

I came accross this book by accident. I'm not a scholar on conversation, so this book not only opened up a new idea to me, but has inspired me investigate more about the topic of conversation. I feel that because it opened my eyes to how I converse and has helped me at my business, it deserves four stars.

I'm reading this book on my way to a conference, a conference where I will give the keynote address and conduct a panel and a workshop. While a lot of what Michael Kahn says seems like plain common sense, it's the putting it into practice that counts. I'll be trying to do just that.

If common sense were always put into practice, we'd call it "common action" instead of common sense. Kahn's examples and propositions are not things to be documented in APA style, but clues to how to act, if you want to have really good, useful conversations that affirm and support you and the person you're talking with. The book is not written for academics, but for people who talk with other people--and would like the results to be more interesting and useful, and less combative.

I'd like to note also, that though it was written before e-mail became a dominant mode of communication for many of us, this book's insights will work well in that environment, and especially on e-lists, where the flow of messages is much like a group conversation.

We've all had conversations that at least might have proceeded in the helpful, healthy ways Kahn suggests. This book is helping me to sort out why my better conversations were better, and learn to make the better ones happen more often. More than that, in less than 200 pages, who can ask?

Considering that the 1978 Yankee team is my all-time favorite, it was disappointing to realize that the first 200 pages of a roughly 360 page book was NOT really about the 1978 season. Kahn spends those first 200 pages talking about other "miracle" teams and great seasons, the origin of the Yankees, and Yankee owners and players pre-1978. If I hear about the "dreary CBS Yankees" one more time...

If you already have some grasp of baseball and Yankee history, that makes those 200 pages mostly a wash. That stuff, as well as mini-bios of 1978 Yankee ownership, executives, and players, should have been put into the first 10 pages or better integrated into an account of the '78 season.

Beyond that, Kahn seems a bit pompous and playing for history.
He has unfavorable things to say about more than one journalist from the era, while getting in things like how "The Boys of Summer outleaped (the New York) Times Snide and went to the top of the best-seller lists." (p. 247)

Great, Roger, but I was hoping this book would be less about your reminiscing about baseball, Yankee (and some Dodger!) history and more for the educated fan of the 1978 Yankees. "The Bronx Zoo," by Sparky Lyle and Peter Golenbock, while not up to the standard set by "Ball Four" by Jim Bouton, is still your best bet when thinking about picking up a book about the 1978 Yankee squad.

This is a terrific book that I could not put down.

I was so surprise by it's contents. Most sports books about a certain event, there is the obligatory "Background chapter" where a brief history is given and then a great deal of detail about the event. Not so here.

Mr. Kahn first presents a detailed history of the Yankees, a history involving money, sports and racism. In learning about the early Yankees and their special relationship with and the Red Sox, Mr. Kahn presents lot more pieces to the Babe Ruth Acquisition than I had known.

It was fascinating to read about the previous owners, their relationships with their Managers and General Managers. There are reminders of the days before free agency, when the owners virtually owned the players.

But more than just one pennant race, one great season, this is story about people. It is story about the self-destructing Billy Martin, the Powerful George Steinbrenner...it's a story about Thurman Munson, Reggie Jackson, Al Rosen and so many others. Its about how a baseball team is run and it is also a story about the reporters who covered them.

If you like baseball, if you like the Yankees this behind the scenes look at a century, a decade and especially a year is compelling. Just remember: The 1978 World series is the conclusion of a great tale, the book is about so muc more than one year.

Forests have been leveled to accommodate the number of books that have been written about the New York Yankees especially during the Steinbrenner years, and you have to wonder what can be said that hasn't been written about numerous times before. However, if I were to have only one book on this subject (I have several) this latest offering by Roger Kahn is the one I would choose. I admit to being partial to Kahn's writing in regard to baseball, but he delves into the personalities of George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, Al Rosen, Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Sparky Lyle, Gabe Paul, Dick Young, Larry MacPhail, and others with anecdotes and humor you probably haven't heard before. This book is littered with stress and alcohol as conflicting personalities clash their way through the 1978 season. Yes, part of the book provides a little history in regard to the Red Sox and Yankees in regard to their previous ownership, but even in this, the author tells these stories with quotes I haven't read in previous books. If you have enjoyed reading other books on this subject, and especially if you enjoy Roger Kahn's writing, this book will not disappoint you.

a swarthy fitness guru who sexercises with rich suburbanites is poisoned. a weak link in an otherwise praiseworthy rachel gold series. a straightforward who-done-it lacking the usual consideration of weightier legal issues.