Gun Games by Faye Kellerman read by Mitchell Greenberg

Short, spoiled and operatic is the 14 year old Persian Jewess who charms Gabe, the poor little rich foundling now living with Peter and Rena Decker. Gabe is a little lovable, a little weird, and very horny. But he is also a musical prodigy, with the lean blonde wits of his assassin father — the unforgettable and immemorial Chris Donatti. Once upon a time, long long ago, Chris Donati also went to highschool in L.A., fell in love in L.A., got in trouble in L.A.

Today L.A. is full of  over-monied teenagers with guns, some suicidal, or maybe not. In between the clumsy  romantic gropings of Gabe and his sobbing Persian Jewess are  the good, old police investigations of Marge and Oliver, a little older, a little tired, a little weepy themselves. Are the high-school suicides really suicides? The whodunit falls by the wayside, unfortunately, and neither the fascinating Donatti nor his curious son can mobilize by this L.A. West Side story.

The Wreckage by Michael Robotham read by Sean Barrett

The perfect voice for a down and out in London and Iraq crime novel, with an entry quote by Orwell. Always a good sign, Orwell. Imagine a classic sting by a pretty girl and her boyfriend: girl alone at bar gets hit by her bruiser boyfriend. Retired police detective comes to the rescue, takes girl home. Girl slips him a mickey, empties his wallet, and splits.

But this is more than a crime novel; listen:

The old man blinks at him.

“You are not an Arab?

“No.”

“What is your religion?”

“I don’t have one.”

“Who is your god?”

“I have no God.”

“What sort of man has no god? What  does he believe in? Why does he live?”

“He lives because he is a man.”

“You are American?”

“I was born there. My mother is Iraqi.”

“I like George Clooney and Arnold Schwarzenneger.”

 

Between Sisters by Kristin Hannah read by Laural Merlington

Think about a perfect sandwich. A happy assemblage of fresh food: bacon, lettuce, tomato. Good and familiar characters, pretty or restful setting, easy, recognizable relationships. Funny dialogue. Simple white or brown bread. A little bit of mayo.  There’s a singular and single female divorce lawyer with a very hungry sex and a very low opinion of men in general and husbands in particular. There’s a weekly meeting with Aunty Shrink. Then there’s her sister. The country mouse: the good friend-good neighbor-good daughter-good mother type with no money but lots of sisterhood. The horny female lawyer who is   or should be a redhead,  organizes sis’s country wedding, meets a sad ex-ile (ex-husband, ex-doctor, ex-person)  and well ……

Why would a novelist want to turn the lawyer into another Doris Day? Like starting out  chumping on a BLT and ending up with the taste of a chocolate covered marshmallow.

The Measure

There should be and will be a measure of a good writer, which is the number of words it takes for the reader to be INSIDE the story. Up, up and away. Peter Robinson: 10. Kristin Hannah/Hannah Kristin: 25. Ernest Hemingway: 4.

The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell read by Richard Green

A gentle voice with exacting intelligence  mourns England, its living unemployed and its generation of  tall, dead men:

Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my childhood’s gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the Flanders mud. In their place there are these pale-faced boys .. If the English physique has declined, this is no doubt partly due to the fact that the Great War carefully selected the million best men in England and slaughtered them, largely before they had had time to breed. (p. 98)

But this entire work is a critique that might well have been directed at America, at today’s America, at its unhealthy way of living, its’cheap substitutes for everything’, its ‘tinned food’ which is a ‘deadlier weapon than the machine gun’, its wastage, its UNEMPLOYMENT.

“It is usually impossible to buy wholemeal bread in a working-class district.” .. the working class palate now rejects good food almost automatically. The number of people who prefer tinned peas and tinned fish to real peas and real fish must be increasing every year, and plenty of people who could afford real milk in their tea would much sooner have gtinnerd milk, even that dreadful tinned milk which is made of sugar and cornflour and has UNFIT FOR BABIES on the tin in huge letters.

The Bone House by Brian Freeman read by Joe Barrett

There is something annoying, something unsettling, something demoralizing about a story in which  all the women are either murder victims,  embittered but useless mothers, faithful, ineffectual wives, or sexually charged students with dancers’ bodies. Annoying, too, is witnessing an entire small town turn against an innocent man and his brainy wife, both outsiders, neither one well-liked.  Into this remote and stupid Wisconsin town drives a detective from Naples, with one earring, spiky hair, a trust fund, (but no lap top), whose  actress mother taught him that “if someone was moving their lips in Los Angeles, they were probably lying.”  This assemblage of unpleasantness doesn’t stop one from wanting to find out who done it.

A Storm at Fairacre, Village Diary, Changes at Fairacre by Miss Read read by Gwen Watford

A pleasant lyrical description of the minute details of English country life presents the full world of a small town’s folk, in all their deep old  habits, their social quirks and irritabilities, and their precious sense of the finite order of inherited obligations.

Mrs Willett can tackle a hundred jobs without having been taught any of them. She can salt pork or beef, make jams, jellies, wines, chutnies and pickles, she can bake pies with all manner of pastries, cakes, tarts, and her own bread, which is particularly delicious, she can make rugs, curtains and her own clothes, she can help a neighbor in childbirth, and at the other end of  life’s span compose a corpse’s limbs for decent burial. She is as good a gardener as her husband, can distemper a room, mend a fuse, and sings in the choir. …. There are so many different activities to engage her that when she tires of one there is another to which she can turn and get refreshment. From turning her heavy old mangle in the washhouse she will come in and sit down to stitch a new skirt. She will prepare a stew and while it simmers on the hob filling the little house with its fragrance, she will practice her part in Mr Annets new anthem, ready for the next Church festival. And… she sees a satsifying result from her labours. The clothes blow on the line. The skirt is  folded and put away in the drawer ready for next Sunday. Mr  Willett will come in and praise her bubbling stew…

In this little English village is a little English school with children who are kept busy snipping gum nosed paper in all the colors of the rainbow.

“Make just what you like: flowers, leaves, lambs, birds, butterflies…anything that makes you think of Spring.
Most of the class had flung themselves with abandon into this glorious snipping session but there were as always one or two stolid and adenoidal babies who were completely without imagination and awaited direction apathetically. “Make grass then”…had said Miss Jackson…

 

From Fairacre to Thrush Green, a  village inferior in coziness and character, whereof spring faithless wives, drunken gravediggers,  vain architects and  stingy spinsters.. With this inferiority comes humor: imagine a fat food-loving Nellie housecleaning for three aged sisters, who spoon out a teaspoon of silver polish each time she comes to clean the house.

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A Friend From England by Anita Brookner read by Cherie Lunghi

Rest, it seems, is a peculiarly English thing. Restfulness in all its timorous, melancholic glory cushions the indoor lives of Oscar and Dorrie Livingstone, in a peculiarly English way. Not as the accidental sidebar of an otherwise busied existence but as an aspiration, a calling, a rigorous end in itself.  Oscar is

…a bulky soft-voiced man with beautifully cared for hands. Something about him broadcasting the resignation of a schoolboy who has to submit to an inspection before he is allowed to leave the house.

All in all they are a placid wistful couple, resigned and melancholy by themselves and for each other. Well fed, well napped, well sheltered they form a restful destination for the nervous, ambitious, insecure and disinclined Rachel Kennedy who would have liked to see herself in this pink shell of kinship and central heating. Miss Kennedy takes up a remote and impassive alliance with Heather, the passive offspring of this mildly inert, mildly well off couple who accommodates her parents imagination by pretending to manage her own clothing shop in London, a Daisy Miller with short hair, unexcitable and worrisome.

She would glide from virginity to matronhood with no sense of a change in her condition. She would duplicate her mother, succeed her, and no doubt become the center of the family circle in her own home with the full approbation of that mother whom she planned so closely to copy… As she sat there emotionless and smiling in the midst of this agitated assembly,  she looked like the bride in a Breughel painting, as if she were already at her own wedding breakfast.

Rachel Kennedy lives a perfectly balanced and satisfyingly sombre life, too glad to come to rest at the Livingstone family home, to inhabit the functionary role of ‘friend’, to perform the duties of that functionary, like a glum, gloved observer at a greenhouse of rest. Here she studies English life, exacting a micro-analytics of personality and sensibility and mood as meticulous as a clinical formula.

Red Hat Society’s Queens of Woodlawn Avenue by Regina Hale Sutherland read by Staci Snell

Imagine three divorced fairy godmothers wearing red hats feeding you yellow cake, laying out your new life, and getting you ready for the charity ball by teaching you how to play bridge. There you have it. The almost penniless newly divorced matron with good manners sets up a home decorating business, stops crying, and learns to negotiate and win.

Sentenced to Death by Lorna Barrett read by Cassandra Campbell

Some divorced women move to New Hampshire and open bookstores. Tricia is a picky, possessive, mulish melancholic who stumbles into murder and mayhem in the most pastoral and unexciting of New England towns, re-invented as “Booktown” for its a sweet new row of shops, including the Haven’t Got a Clue Bookstore, the Happy Domestic, the By Hook or By Book, and other simulacra of quaintness. It is not surprising that a population of displaced, overeducated crybabies inhabiting an imitation of a old English village should have its criminals. Or that its criminals should have the same tired motives, the same drab archive of excuses, the same greedy and disingenuine personalities as their urban derivation. Or that its murders should be solved by the overcurious spinsterish busybody that runs the vintage mystery bookstore.