Buy it from

Damage-by Josephine Hart

A supposedly happy man in his forties-a respected minister of parliament-meets a stunning woman half his age who cuts him to the quick. Somehow, through sharing the briefest of glances, each knows that they are irresistably bound together. This inevitability of their coupling is doubly unfortunate, for not only is the protagonist married, but the woman, Anna, is engaged-to the man's son, as it turns out.

How the two of them react to this knowledge, and their powerlessness to avoid its tragic results, make for a wonderfully harrowing reading experience. Sadly, this experience-and the writer's powerful description of the psychological bond between the two of them, did not translate well to the screen. Jeremy Irons played the man; Juliette Binoche played the fiancee. Neither of them could save the movie, which degenerated from a satisfying, deeply psychological tragedy on the page to a hollow, incomprehensible mess on film.

Buy it from

Kiss the Girls-by James Patterson

This delightfully twisted thriller features not one psychopath but two of them, operating on opposite sides of the country and each trying to 'outdo' the other. "Casanova" fancies himself a ladies man, kidnapping exceptionally beautiful women and holding them captive in a secret lair where they are kept alive-but would probably prefer not to be. "The Gentleman Caller" is anything but a gentleman, stalking his victims carefully, carving them up with particular care, and sharing the gory details with the press-who publishes the information in hopes of preventing future crimes.

The case gets personal for homicide expert (and recurring Patterson hero) Alex Cross when his beautiful twenty-year-old niece disappears from the same college campus where Casanova's other victims had vanished. Pressed for time, terrified that he may already be too late, Alex uses his unique psychological training and deductive skills to get inside the minds of these grisly madmen and try to anticipate their moves.

Although some of the more disturbing scenes in this book would have been impossible (or at least inadvisable) to convey onscreen, the filmmakers involved botched the entire thing completely. The three leads (Morgan Freeman, Cary Elwes, and Ashley Judd) were horribly miscast (with Freeman playing a character at least twenty years his junior), the "Gentleman Caller" storyline was essentially eliminated, and what started as a uniquely complex thriller turned into a garden-variety serial killer flick. Ironically, the movie did considerably better in theatres than it deserved to.