I was told, she avoids reporters, but gladly will open up to her public and fans. Mata Hari was like that, and Indira Gandhi tried to be one. Bernard who studied film with Ann Douglas, and writing with Elizabeth Hardwick, has her own perception of the cosmos of movies. Don't argue with her. She knows her craft. She is sweet like the gentle whisper of a butterfly but, Bernard can be tough too and she will not hesitate a second  to tell you what she thinks of you, of your work and her colleagues. For instance, Bernard believes that Rex Reed's writings are "wrong-headed and infuriating", Dave Kehr is witty, David Denby is a good writer. She admires the intellect of Jim Hoberman,  the politeness and savoir-faire of Jack Mathews. Clive James, Stephanie Zacharek and Charles Taylor are among her "favoris". Bernard also believes that exotic films are thrilling and wonderful, and news reporting is awful. She loves "Double Indemnity", "West Side Story", "Crash", " Silence of the Lambs",  "Klute", and "The Ghost and Mrs. Muir", but not bad stuff like Charlie Chan's flicks, and sadistic, cruel, hateful movies like "The Passion of the Christ". What else about Jami Bernard? Intelligent humor is part of her critiques, especially, when she hammers strong on bad movies. And by doing so, Bernard rejoices, for when a film is bad, it becomes easier for Bernard  to be entertaining about it. Parisian legend, Mistinguet used to confront her envious cabaret rivals by telling them "I don't mind your criticism, as long as you do it with class and at the sound of Dom Perignon bubbles." Jami Bernard's films critiques bubble with humor, depth and classy intelligence. Is she a team player in this tumultuous cosmos of journalism and  among and around her colleagues? You bet! She knows the ropes. Although, she believes that many editors are jealous of film critics' unrestrained autonomy, Bernard manages to bring sync and harmony into her professional relationship with those editors and managing editors whom she disagrees with.

SCHOOL DAYS: Robert B. Parker. (G.P. Putnam's Sons)Police chief to Spenser: "We played it by the book. Straight down the line. By the book. And, by God, we kept a tragedy from turning into a holocaust.

Robert Parker's novels featuring a Boston private detective named Spenser got off to a slam-bang start in the 1970s. But since then, the series has grown in popularity but deteriorated in quality, the plots becoming as thin as negligees and the wisecracking detective turning into a parody of himself. It's not that Parker forgot how to write. Double Play, his fine 2004 novel about baseball, race relations and redemption, proved that he still can. But the Spenser series appeared long past saving. Occasionally, Parker would perk up enough to write a few chapters reminding us of why we liked Spenser so much in the first place, but he never got around to writing another good book. So School Days, the best Spenser novel since Early Autumn (1981) comes as a welcome surprise. This time, Parker has given his hero a case that is worthy of him: Two boys armed with four semiautomatic handguns gun down seven teachers and students in a suburban high school. The cops catch one of the boys in the act, and he rats out another, Jared Clark, who promptly confesses. Jared's grandmother hires Spenser to prove his innocence. It doesn't take long for our hero to realize Jared is guilty as charged. The best Spenser can do is dig up extenuating circumstances that could get Jared into a less unpleasant prison _ or, as Spenser puts it, "the easiest room in hell." So Spenser seeks to answer two questions: How did two suburban kids get their hands on semiautomatics? And why did they go on a killing rampage? Aside from the prosecutor, a good guy who cares as much about justice as his conviction record, no one is much interested in helping Spenser find the answers _ not the school officials, or the local police, or Jared's lawyer or even his parents. They all just want to forget and move on. Or are they hiding something?

The more they stonewall, the harder Spenser digs.

Before long, the digging gets a couple of kids killed, one by Spenser's hand, prompting a bit of characteristic Spenser soul-searching: "When I eventually figured out why Jared shot up his school, what would I have? The truth? Was that worth two bodies? The world had probably lost more for less. But they were alive, and now they weren't. Maybe the truth wasn't worth dying for. Or killing for. Maybe it never had been." There is a bit of bad news. Spenser's menacing friend, Hawk, one of the more appealing characters in modern crime fiction, fails to make an appearance, even though there were several moments when Spenser could have used his help. But Parker more than makes up for this by sending Spenser's insufferably precious girlfriend, psychologist Susan Silverman, on an out-of-town trip. Big strong Spenser whimpers his love to her over the telephone and she returns to leap into his arms in a superfluous final chapter, but we are thankfully spared the streams of Silverman psychobabble that have marred so many other Spenser novels. Throughout, Spenser is, as always, a smart mouth, or, as his elderly client puts it, "a wisenheimer." Police chief to Spenser: "We played it by the book. Straight down the line. By the book. And, by God, we kept a tragedy from turning into a holocaust." Reviewer: B. Silva

Good Lord, the man is 87 years old! And still going strong! For veteran TV journalist Mike Wallace, one advantage of old age is that he who lives longest gets to write the last word. And in this, his second memoir, Wallace does precisely that. The book is promoted as a collection of his most memorable interviews, beginning with those heady days in the 1950s when he arrived on the scene with a much-talked-about New York interview show in which he came on like a shark, causing interview subjects to cringe (Bill O'Reilly, eat your heart out!). His nickname was Mike Malice. From kings to politicians, movie stars to gangsters, Wallace pulled no punches and that continued right through to today with CBS's now-legendary 60 Minutes. But he has always prided himself on being tough but fair and that means a mea culpa or two along the way. He is quite open about his bouts of severe depression (a "dark and devastating malaise" that nearly led to suicide), about how, like other journalists in those early days, he shilled for a cigarette sponsor. And about the few times he screwed up when eagerness overtook caution. Near the end of the book, he dwells extensively on the two most infamous events of his career. The first occurred in the early 1980s when CBS did a report on how Gen. William Westmoreland and his underlings intentionally lowballed the size of the enemy forces in Vietnam. As a result, everyone was caught off guard by the intensity of the Tet Offensive, which led to the U.S. pullout. A lengthy court battle ensued and eventually Westmoreland withdrew his accusations that he was smeared but not before a lot of reputations, including Wallace's, were tarnished. Then the tobacco case, the one that ended up as the Al Pacino-Russell Crowe movie The Insider. As in the previous scandal, Wallace does not hold back on his disappointment that his network superiors failed to back him up, in this case in his desire to put a tobacco company whistleblower on the air. (He notes the son of the chairman of CBS at the time was a tobacco industry mogul.) In fact, the outcome led to a painful breach in his decades-old relationship with 60 Minutes creator and producer Don Hewitt. But at least he got to be played by Christopher Plummer. "It's not the worst thing in the world to see yourself portrayed on the silver screen by a handsome and urbane Canadian." he writes. "I may not know that much about how they make movies in Hollywood, but I do know enough to recognize typecasting when I see it." Reviewer: John McCay

Connie Burns is a Reuters correspondent who covers the news in war-torn areas. She's seen some of the most horrific things people can do to each other. While she's in Sierra Leone, she learns of the brutal murders of five women. She begins to suspect that the soldiers who were tortured into confessing weren't actually guilty, but that instead the murders were committed by a shady, dangerous Brit, John Harwood, who seems to keep popping up in the places she's been posted to. She shares her suspicions with a friendly British police officer but has nothing to go on. And then she sees Harwood again in Iraq. He's going under a different name and is working with the Americans, and when she asks about him they deny any knowledge of him. When she warns his employers about him, she gets kidnapped. Burns is released after three days, apparently unharmed, and flees back to Britain. She tells people little of what happened to her, but continues to work with that British police officer to bring Harwood to justice, knowing that he will come looking for her. Like Walters's last few novels, The Devil's Feather is very uneven. She sets up great tension and then lets it drop over small domestic matters. She adds a subplot that is unnecessary and distracting. She creates two psychologically fragile characters and then doesn't let them go believably to pieces. And she creates an evil psychopath who just might not be as dangerous as all that. Walters also uses one of her favourite devices, interspersing the story with e-mails, news stories and police reports. It might appeal to people who find reading a straightforward narrative boring, but quickly becomes old to anyone who prefers that the author just tell the story. Minette Walters on a bad day is a lot better than many other mystery writers at their best. This book is well done -- just not as good as her readers might expect.

The story of the making of this novel is as interesting as the book itself -- the tale of a Scottish-American sea captain who signs on with some Chinese pirates in the South Pacific during the 1920s. The late Marlon Brando struck up a friendship with Donald Cammell during the 1960s when the actor was in France shooting The Young Lions. The two eccentrics had many character similarities and decided to collaborate on this ultimately unfinished project. "There were profound streaks of fatalism and self-destruction in both Brando and Cammell that were played out to the sinister music of southern California and the business," writes editor and film historian David Thomson in an afterword that seeks to explain their unusual and sometimes rocky relationship. (He also finished the last chapter.) Brando turned his back on the Hollywood star system and systematically threw away his God-given good looks. He died last year at 80. Cammell, less of a creative success in film and other art circles and with his mind disintegrating into deep manic depression, committed suicide in 1996. But it was back in the 1970s when the enigmatic film star came up with the story-line and roughed out what he apparently hoped would end up as a screenplay. Cammell polished it into a novel, the unfinished manuscript emerging only after both men were dead. Our hero is Capt. Anatole Doultry, Annie for short, who at the beginning of the story is just getting out of Hong Kong's notorious Victoria Gaol after a six-month stretch. He had been framed on a gun-running charge. In a shady Macao bar-casino where they play the Chinese card game of Fan-Tan (the novel reeks with period detail), Annie joins forces with a true dragon lady, the beautiful but ruthless gangster Madame Lai Choi San. The attraction is both sexual and monetary, for she plans to rob a major silver bullion shipment on the high seas and needs Annie's expertise in the still-evolving science of shipboard radio to pull it off. Annie has some moral fibre but the deal is irresistible... if he can trust her cutthroat Chinese gang and they him. Actually rather slim on plot, this somewhat old-fashioned swashbuckling tale (the alluring dust cover is even a replica of a 1930s pulp publication) is dense with detail of the colourful characters and the time and place and shows considerable research on everything from nautical jargon to regional politics to seafaring philosophy. In reading, it's not hard to picture that Brando of Last Tango in Paris days in the role of the reluctant and droll swashbuckler Annie Doultry. An interesting legacy from the screen legend. Reviewer: J.  Cay