Ella Minnow Pea; Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime; Where are the Children?

"Ella Minnow Pea" by Mark Dunn was really cute, about a group of people living on Nollop Island who consider the creator of the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" to be their literary guru and have erected a statue to him containing that sentence. When letters start falling off the statue, the council decides that Nollop is speaking from the grave and wants the citizens of his island to stop using those letters. At first most of the islanders are up to the challenge, but eventually, as more tiles fall and they have fewer and fewer letters of the alphabet to choose from, more and more islanders are banished for breaking the rules by speaking or writing with those now forbidden letters. It is up to a couple of determined people to come up with a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet with only 32 letters. It was interesting to see how the islanders coped with the restrictions placed on them (the whole book is told in letter form). I would read it again.
"Everybody Kills Somebody Sometime" by Robert J. Randisi is a mystery featuring the Rat Pack. Frank, Dean, Sammy, and the rest of the gang are in Vegas shooting "Ocean's 11" when Dean starts getting threatening letters. Frank asks the Sands' pit boss, Eddie G., who has Vegas wired, to check around and see who is behind the threats. Eddie, in the course of fulfilling this favor to Frank, accidentally stumbles into a couple of murders and is almost killed himself. It was a really good book; the mystery was well written and kept me guessing, and the voices of the Rat Pack seemed authentic. I'd read it again. Randisi has another Rat Pack mystery I'm eager to read now.
"Where are the Children?" by Mary Higgins Clark was one I read because I'm trying to read things I normally wouldn't, so I can better understand why people enjoy them. Clark is so popular, I figured her books must be spectacular. Maybe it was just this one, but it seemed really contrived. Of course, it was written in 1975, so many others have basically done the same thing she does (only better), so I don't know for sure if she did it first. In this book Nancy has two young children and on the seven year anniversary of the murder of her first two children her two new children are kidnapped. Nancy had been convicted of murdering the first two, but the verdict was thrown out after members of the jury were discovered to have been discussing the case in the middle of it. The prosecution couldn't retry because his star witness disappeared. Now of course everyone in the small Cape Cod town she's living in thinks she killed her new kids, too. It was easy to tell who the bad guy was and what was going to happen in the end. The only way I can describe why I didn't like this book is to say this: if Stephen King had written it, it would have been 600 pages long instead of 280. He would have fleshed it out, and added some flashback courtroom scenes, some unexpected twists, and the characters really would have popped. I don't know, I just didn't feel like it was worth investing my time in these people, they were so one dimensional. I won't read this one again, and I probably won't read anymore by Clark. I can see why people read her, because she is quick and easy, but it's just not my cup of tea.