>I just finished listening to Lisa Scottoline's new mystery, Dirty Blonde, and am confounded by one of the plot points. (Spoiler.)

Cate Fante, a newbie Philadelphia judge, has a little problem with stress, and has been relieving it once a month or so by picking up rough trade at seedy bars and bedding them in no-tell motels. In the course of a high-profile court case, her secret life comes out and is splashed all over the news and papers. It's actually rather daring of Scottoline to give her heroine such an icky compulsion to deal with; the problem is the tidy way in which the novel cleans it up: early on, Cate confesses her latest indiscretion to her best friend, swears never to do it again, and, apparently, never does. Why give a character such a interesting dark side only to solve the problem by switching on a light? Why raise demons only to exorcise them so easily?

Of course, had Dirty Blonde been a YA novel, we might have been subjected to endless scenes of cutting, OCD, and Cate's sessions with her court-appointed (and long-winded) psychologist, so maybe I should count my blessings.