After enduring an annoying delay getting over the Rainbow Bridge to be admitted to Canada, I drove to Niagara-on-the-Lake. I picked up Patti and Phil Abbott at their bed-and-breakfast and we zipped over to St. Catherine’s to the Book Depot. Have you ever visited a bookstore where you needed a shopping cart? The Book Depot is a huge warehouse filled with remaindered books. I like it because British editions sometimes show up there for incredibly cheap prices. Both Patti and I did very well in the “bargain book” section where books were priced $2 a book. Irresistible! Then we had another annoying delay on the Rainbow Bridge to enter the U.S. I took Patti and Phil to lunch at Guy Fieri’s favorite restaurant from DINER, DRIVE-INS, AND DIVES: Pizza Junction. Phil and I ordered pizzas while Patti tackled the Philly cheese-steak sandwich. Then I took Patti and Phil to another remainder bookstore, The Book Outlet. More economic stimulus! When we picked up Diane, Patti and Phil got a tour of the Kelley Collection 2 (aka, The Bat Cave). You’d think Patti never saw 30,000 books in a basement before! We finally caught a break traveling back over the Rainbow Bridge (no delays) and we dropped Patti and Phil back at their B&B. We met up again later in Niagara-on-the-Lake for a quick snack (thanks, Phil!) before we attended the Shaw Festival’s wonderful play, An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. Great conversation, great fun! Let’s do it again someday, Patti and Phil!

Scott Turow’s sequel to his best-selling Presumed Innocent perpetuates some of the same flaws as the original novel: too long, too static, and too derivative. In the original novel, Rusty Savich, is charged with murdering a woman he was having an affair with. The strengths of Presumed Innocent were the court room scenes and the cunning legal strategy. Innocent has court room scenes, but not enough of them. And Turow annoyed me with his “technique” of switching from first-person narration to third-person narration. Innocent plays with irony as Savich, now a judge and seemingly brain-addled, gets into another affair with a much younger woman, violates basic legal procedure by revealing a pending verdict to a defendant (who, not surprisingly, skips bail), and then is accused of murdering his bipolar wife. At least a 100 pages of this 400+ page novel could have been edited out. I wonder if Harrison Ford will play Savich in the movie version of Innocent. GRADE: C
(Thanks to the North Tonawanda Public Library for providing this book.)