Sometimes I think people write to exorcise personal demons. This is one of those times, and I was not sorry when, like at the end of an overblown grand opera, all the main characters died. Catharsis. Baas. The end.The main character is an adopted girl who has had a safe and secure Italian-American childhood in Schenectady, NY but goes in search of her birth parents. In California, she discovers that they are both dangerous and totally whacko, and that she, herself, is more a product of nature than nurture.This has a better story line than any in Mukherjee's short story collection entitled "Darkness," but it is equally wierd. "Leave it to Me" and "Darkness" are similarly creepy books and not up to Mukherjee's usual brilliant standards.Kim BurdickStanton, Delaware