Paint Relief

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Gemcare's Radience 2000 is by far the best precious metal cleaner and polish I have come across. I am the jeweler for a charity thrift store and we get a lot of silver and some gold jewelry as well. Most of it is tarnished and needs cleaning. This product makes most of the pieces shine like new. I also use it on some of the better costume jewelry. Definitely helps to sell our merchandise.

I really like this jewelry cleaner. My ring looks just like it did when we bought it.

This polish is great stuff. I first bought it at a home and flower show in Cleveland.

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This is great to add that special touch to natural stones. Great three strand clasp.

Reviews

The Copper Bracelet is the second installment in the Harry Middleton story. Harry is former military officer, former music teacher, current hunter of war criminals. Along with his compatriots, the Volunteers, Harry Middleton is after war criminals from Kashmir. The story behind the book is pretty simple - Jeffery Deaver ( Garden of Beasts: A Novel of Berlin 1936 ), a well-known writer of action thrillers started out an international thriller by writing the first chapter. Then the story was handed off to another author and a chapter was added (16 authors in total) until it got back Deaver who wrote the concluding chapter. This is a slightly different group of writers than in the first novel, The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller [CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT]. The Copper Bracelet is a bit smoother than the first book, but it still has its herky-jerky moments in which characters are introduced and than promptly killed. To me, the bad guys seemed rather James Bond Super-Villain-ish, which for me is too cartoonish to be interesting. The most interesting feature of the audiobook is the last "Bonus" disc that includes an interview with the narrator, veteran actor Alfred Molina (Spider-Man/Spider-Man 2 ) and an interview with Jeffrey Deaver and a couple of authors about the process they used to write the book. Most interestingly, no overall plot was ever discussed beforehand - the authors receive the completed chapters and have a limited amount of time to add another chapter before it gets handed off to the next author in line.

Jeffrey Deaver, the international best-selling author of more than two dozen books and short story collections, including the Lincoln Rhyme series, has just recently released an audio book, The Copper Bracelet. It is the second in a series for which he writes the first and last chapters. Each of the intervening sixteen chapters is written by a different well known mystery or thriller author, such as Lee Child (Jack Reacher series), David Hewson (Nic Costa series), Lisa Scottoline (Daddy's Girl) and Linda Barnes (Carlotta Carlyle series). The Copper Bracelet is touted as a sequel to Deaver's previous audio book, The Chopin Manuscript, sharing as their protagonist, Harold Middleton and his team of volunteer adventurers, and the same narrator, the actor Alfred Molina. The versatile Molina doesn't just read the text, he gives each character a distinctive personality and employs appropriate accents in dialogues when characters are not native English speakers. However, with each chapter written by a different author being a novelty, The Copper Bracelet suffers from the uneven quality and styles of the contributors. The major problem is that each is required to conform with plot details and new characters added by his or her predecessors and venue changes from sophisticated Europe to the wilds of Kashmir. One difficulty arises when one of the characters introduced by Deaver as a major villain in his opening chapter is summarily killed early on, forcing the succeeding writers to invent an entirely new plot direction. This may be disorienting for listeners, especially those who will probably not be listening to the seven narrative DVDS at one sitting. The Copper Bracelet is longer than The Chopin Manuscript, with a running time of nine hours, twenty-nine minutes versus the prequel's seven hours, thirty four minutes. An eighth disc includes an interview with the narrator and a roundtable discussion by the authors.

This novel opens with a hitman, Balan, in a moral quandary. He is watching the family he is to kill while they have their last day and meal on a beach in the south of France. Balan has been told to leave no one alive, but the family includes a baby and this causes him some pause. He does not like the idea of killing a baby so he makes a plan to leave the baby alive and to explain to his boss, Zakari, that someone was approaching and he couldn't finish. Zakari taught him to think of his gun as an extension of himself, of thinking of it as a way to open the skin and let the spirit out, to let the body kill itself. Apparently, Balan is a Hindi who believes he is doing higher work. Isn't that always the way of hitmen? A lot of violence follows and a new villain, The Scorpion, emerges. The hitman's cell phone carries a message, a threat for an entire village. The copper bracelet worn by the hitman has intricate etching in Hindi or Sanskrit. It isn't much of a clue but it is all Middleton has. Middleton is on the hunt for someone he doesn't know, in Tampa or London, with this small clue. Pierre Crane, an investigative reporter with Reuters, meets with the Scorpion, leading to Crane telling the story he discovered of three brilliant young men from impoverished backgrounds, a Pakistani, an Indian, and a Kashmiri, all born poor, who are subsidized through their British education from age ten, by an anonymous donor and who are then are funded in their businesses after they graduate from Cambridge. Two out of three of these men are now dead. One drowned in a flood, another poisoned by bad well water, while the third, the Kashmiri, Zakari sold his business and moved to the bush where he lived as a warlord and `would be saint.' All three men were Hindi. Zakari said their benefactor was holy, but `of this world.' He found a connection to the three men through Blue Watch services, in Dubai, an investigative company that serviced the very rich. Crane is intrigued by the Scorpion, believing the Scorpion was the mysterious benefactor. The Scorpion denies a role in the `experiment' and warns Crane about Middleton, a former military intelligence officer. Violence follows. Violence almost always follows. Sometimes it's difficult to keep track of the violence and the violent. Good guys are bad guys, chaffeurs are the boss. Everybody shoots somebody at one point or another. Like the first Middleton book, The Chopin Manuscript: A Serial Thriller [CHOPIN MANUSCRIPT], this is a very complicated story. I found myself backing up the first CD a number of times to make sure I understood the story. (Track 60 on Disk 1 begins the activities of Crane.) It could just be that I'm slow but I don't recommend trying to listen to the first CD in the car -- unless you don't mind being a menace on the road. This brings back the cast of characters, Middleton's ragtag army, into action again. While this presumably could be a stand alone novel, that would make it much more difficult to follow. It's hard enough when you know many of the characters. The writers are: Jeffery Deaver, Gayle Lynds, David Hewson, Jim Fusilli, John Gilstrap, Joseph Finder, Lisa Scottoline, David Corbett, Linda Barnes, Jenny Siler, David Liss, P.J. Parrish, Brett Battles, Lee Child, Jon Land, and James Phelan. This is a first rate line up again: lots of brilliant writers with lots of interesting styles! The Copper Bracelet is another excellent thriller. I highly recommend it.

I must confess I like to read (actually I love to read); I like holding a book in my hands and focusing my eyes on the pages, so I'm not a big fan of audio books. Quality-wise this audio recording is great: the reader is talented and really brings each character to life. As many other reviewers have noted, this is a very convoluted plot with many characters with hard to remember names which makes following the story (to me, anyway) harder than if I were reading a book. I thought the authors did a fantastic job of seamlessly flowing the chapters written by different authors together. I'm a huge Deaver fan as well as many of the other contributing authors so it was a good experience to have many of them contribute. I expect I'll go back and purchase the previous "book" (I think it, too, was originally released in audio format); my local Sam's club has both stories in one book so I'll probably get that so I'll have the whole series.

I was very impressed with this production on cd of the book. Other books, while they are good stories, lose a little in the reading. Alfred Molina does an incredible job creating a group of characters. His voice is easy on the ear, his accents and dialects are superb. The story itself is better than I expected. So often with a collabrative effort such as this there are jarring shifts in tone and story line. This one did not. It is a well told thriller with a big enough cast to allow the story to jump back and forth to build suspense. In fact, I found this story easier to follow than some single authored stories. Characters come and go, the story twists and turns, but it is seamless in the telling. Follow the movements of a group of volunteers who hunt war criminals as they go after a terrorist with a truly evil history in murder and genocide. Throw in an evil son, the mysterious deadly woman and a shadowy figure called the Scorpion. Really this was a great listen.

Reviews

The title pretty much sums it up! But, there's more! The stainless steel metal on this watch is well made. I can detest to that, I have mine for more then five-years now! It definitely still looks the same from the day I bought it! Amazingly this watch has a some weight to it giving it an expensive feel. The appealing side of it is well rounded, well polished with very interesting contrast and details to the gold and black finished sub-dials. For the price? This watch can be sold for almost double of that which is advertised and still be worth every penny!

After looking to replace a watch my wife bought me, I decided to buy this one. The watch face is nice, different from the usual black or white without looking childish or odd. I read other reviwers on how difficult it is to adjust the band size but I had no problem. I have a small wrist and had to remove 3 segments but now I think I will add 1 back as it feels just a bit too snug. The small dials are just a bit too small to read without glasses or good light. That is the only thing stopping me from giving the watch a better rating. But let's face it how many times do you really need to refer to your watch to find the day of the week or the date? That's why I don't want a watch with so many dials and stops, etc.

After getting bored with my titan piece I tried this watch. Its been 10 months to this purchase and working great. Great in looks and also no other problem. I think it worth the money. I guess I bought it fro 28 USD.

This watch is really beautiful to look at, and I'm sure it would keep great time and last for years. Even so, it's going back. The first time I picked it up, I was struck by how HEAVY it is compared to other watches I've worn. Out of curiosity, I put it on a postal scale. The watch weighs 3.9 ounces, or about a quarter of a pound. That may not sound like much if you're weighing apples, but it's a lot to wear on your wrist all day. I have an old analog watch with leather band, and it weighed in at 1.6 ounces. The other problem is the length of the band. I'm a six-foot man and definitely not wimpish, though my wrist is on the small side. I would have to remove two or more links from the band to get a decent fit. Casio doesn't provide any instructions, so I read several online descriptions of the process before giving it a try. I'm handy enough with tools, but was unable to get the job done without risking doing some damage, so stopped. I'm not going to pay a jeweler to do it. My previous watch was a Casio "ana-digi" hybrid which I ended up disliking. It required too much button pushing for this old brain, plus it stopped several times for no apparent reason. All I want is a lightweight analog watch in the $30-$40 price range. I'm not going to buy another one sight unseen, so will probably go to WalMart or equivalent and try before I buy. This Casio is going back to Amazon.

Very good looking watch. Can't tell this is the $30 watch. Happy with the product. Do not have to explain about the Casio duability.