I can definitely recommend Nora Roberts for the 82-y.o.--she's not too explicit, and writes very well. For the 70-y.o., have you thought about autobiographies? I remember ten years ago getting the Barbara Bush one for my grandmother who had similar tastes.

Anybody who likes romances will loooooove the Pamela Harriman biography. She was a hussy who was no better than she should be and bagged most of the influential men from WWII forward; she started off with Winston Churchill's son. It's ten years old; what are the chances she's read it?

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Biographies of the Mitfords (no relation to the books) and the Langstons (Nancy Astor and sisters) are always v. satisfying to romance readers. Drama galore.

I like John Wyndham -- as a teen in the UK it was pretty impossible to avoid his TV adaptations

I think there was just the one book of his that was translated into Hebrew, so I had no idea about anything else he'd written until you mentioned it. I loved that tv show as a child, and yet it never occurred to me that it was based on a book.

The only reason the author's name didn't fall through my sieve was because in a book I really loved as a kid, The Willoughby Captains", there were a couple of characters named Wyndham (two brothers).

The main character was named Riddell, and I liked him so much that whenever Voldemort's "human" name is mentioned, I have to remind myself that it's a different character.

OK, I just finished The Time-Traveler's Wife. I didn't love it.

I've just started reading it this weekend! Which means, of course, that I can't have any opinion on it yet, so I don't really have anything to respond to you, so, um, this post is not very full of content.

[Edit: Sorry for the delay in the answers. I was computer-less for a few days. This is pretty much the only thread I can keep up with anymore, and even that is because I have no idea what half the posts are talking about.]

[Another Edit: Am-Chau! It was your birthday when I was computerless, so belated wishes, and I hope you'll have a great year!]

Thank you, Nilly!

And, err, in on-topic news, I had several books for my birthday. Two about manuscripts-- The Book of Kells and the Maccesfield Psalter-- and John Hegley's The Sound of Paint Drying.

I just finished listening to an audiobook of PD James's Unnatural Causes. Started out well, but then she got coy on me, having one detective explain whodunnit to another without telling us.

As flaws in mystery narrative go, this is a big one for me, near akin to having the crime solved on the basis of truly arcane knowledge, or some detail like smell that wasn't revealed to the readers.

Is she coy like that in the rest of her work? I liked the rest of the book, but if she's going to bait and switch me in another novel, I'd rather not start.

I used to be a big fan, but I don't remember if she does that a lot or not.

Started out well, but then she got coy on me

Yeah -- I'm thinking, a genre designed to revolve around a knowledge deficit shared by characters and reader really has a hard time recovering, if the characters up and refuse to share (either deficit or knowledge) with the reader.

Or anyway, only Encyclopedia Brown can get away with that kind of thing, and only if he explains himself after you turn a blank page.

having one detective explain whodunnit to another without telling us.

I'm confused what you mean by this. Do you mean one detective told another who the culprit was, but the author never explained how it was figured out, or one detective told another off-page, as it were?

PD James does occasionally do the annoying thing when one character says to another, "Let me tell you what we found in the house," and then we don't learn what that was until they're arresting the murderer. In her recent books, my main problem is that, for my taste, we spend way too much time with the murderer and the victims. In some books, I get awfully fond of the the victims before they're brutally murdered and in others I think I would have murdered this person myself.