"You know how Thais are: totally fair minded Buddhists until their personal income is threatened." For we farang,  the improbability of Thailand is as good as fiction. Where else would one find a dejected pot-smoking homicide detective and his long-haired assistant, a "Kathoey transsexual who has not yet scraped together theThe Godfather of Kathmandu by John Burdett read by Stephen Hogan

Witty, enchanting and enchanted spectacle of Catholic familydom. Utterly charming characters; slightly wooden plots.Younger Than Springtime by Andrew Greeley read by Jonathan Marosz

A short sharp meditation on how we know what we know and how we decide what we decide by the director of the Center of Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. When I became director of the Max Planck institute of Human Development,Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer read by Dick Hill

If you walk into a bar and hear a bunch of guys wondering about why angels have to sit on clouds "as if they don't got chairs in heaven," you're probably in a Dortmunder novel. If the guys are hunched over their drinks with that 1000-yard stare that suggests thatMetaphors as Politics: Donald Westlake: Watch Your Back!

An acoustical hog. There is no one as good as Griffin on the hearts and minds of the Military, and no one as bad as the histrionic, oversyncopated, overamplifed, over-the-top Dick Hill reading him. A pity. Where is the outstanding Michael Russotto? By Order of the President by W.E.B. Griffin misread by Dick Hill

The voice is everything. Instead of the typical pomposity of a haughty OBE accent, spouting that mixture of bad faith, betrayal, and malice so characteristic of the displaced British upper class, we have a whisper, a tempered, middle brow tone telling a tale about a slightly fat slightly alcoholic NottinghamROUGH TREATMENT by JOHN HARVEY::JOHN WILKINSON

Yes, we know that it is very important for there to be a gun on the table and a timer, clicking down, on the first page of the story. Someone is murdered, and by the end of the story someone else is found culpable. Someone is training, and by theFirewatch by Nelson DeMille read by Scott Brick

Gwenda gets off the boat at Plymouth, hires a car, looks for village to live in. And finds one: a perfectly charming cottage with aga, a kitchen garden and flowered wallpaper. Gwenda moves in with her rosewood, her mahogany, her papermache, her chintz and all the fabrics ofSleeping Murder by Agatha Christie read by Rosemary Leach

"Your cigar fell down. You told me how good it was and how all the women liked your big cigar. We hardly started smoking and your cigar fell down." It is Havana radio. The whores are called hinateras, jockeys, to describe the way a girl might ride a pig.Havana Bay by Martin Cruz Smith read by Frank Muller

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 ofGun Games by Faye Kellerman read by Mitchell Greenberg

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 Measure

Connor O'Brien, our man in Pluto, does Tanenbaum, and all of his staggeringly brilliant, souls: Butch Karp, ex pro basketball player & New York A.D.A.; Mar-LENE, his smart, sexy, Sicilian one-eyed private eye wife; ex-cop Dead Harry, who props up the depressive position; Tron, Viet Cong assassin & Noodle maker,IRRESISTABLE IMPULSE by Robert K Tanenbaum::Connor O'Brien

A  collection of lost boys with dyslexia, poor little rich girls, orphans with personality disorders, meet in Atlanta, on different sides of the law.Fractured by Karen Slaughter read by Phil Gigante

Dick Francis died in his home on the Cayman Islands. He was 89. A successful steeplechase jockey, Francis turned to writing after he retired from racing in 1957. He penned 42 novels, many of which featured racing as a theme. His books were translated into more than 20 languages, and inDick Francis 1921-2010

A dirge so distant from the whiny unpleasantness of the latest slag of female fiction, it might as well be written by a different sex... a mother sex, a sister sex, a mourning sex, an Irish sex.The Gathering by Anna Enright read by Fiona Shaw