A widowed librarian makes friends with an old man who leaves her his land in Australia, near Perth, on the condition that she will live there for a year, alone. She leaves her brother with his communication problems and moves to the charming Western Australian estate, where the passionate, difficult artist next door intrigues her. The old man had wished for this before his death, and advised her that she would have to play seductress… Meanwhile, a wicked nephew tries to scare her off the land, her brother tries to boss her around, and the painter’s daughter comes for a long visit. Kirsty’s feisty personality blooms in Australia, and the local characters are cozy and sweet in their down under accents. Well read.
Winter of Secrets by Vicki Delany read by Carrington MacDuffie
Every hyphenated family is unhappy in its own way. And so the Wyatt-Yarmouth family is unhappy not only because its son has died in a small town in British Columbia where a sweet, incompetent, merry constable is trying to keep the peace. There is also a venomous unpretty daughter, an insecure husband, and a dispassionate wife, member of the Order of Canada.
Fresh, overcurious and awkward, Constable Molly Smith is singularly naive, singularly enthusiastic, and singularly unaccustomed to her office.
Molly (nee Moonlight) with her short, red-haired, hippie ex-patriot mother and her draft dodger father, is at the center of a local catchment of friends, neighbors, merchants and townspeople who treat her like their favorite niece. With her polite, blushing demeanour she is the key to the authenticity of each Canadian mystery, as she accompanies Detective Sargeant Winters in his interrogation of suspects.
Bait by Kenneth Abel read by Frank Muller
When and if you have to describe beauty don’t do it from the front. Do it against the public eye, and against the visual. This is a book not a movie, so listen:
He felt her looking at him, her eyes amused behind those little round glasses like the hippies used to wear, blond hair pulled back into a thick braid… He watched her walk back into the file stacks… her legs taut beneath the faded jeans.”
A description is born from an interested perception, inside a relationship, between people or between a person and a thing. Even a measurement is born of a relationship. The blond hair is pulled back, touched, handled by particular hands. Part of what makes this woman a woman Jack meets behind a counter. She is a counter girl, and eventually that counter is bedded down along with the girl, her thighs, her glasses.
No need to use the brand of the jeans — the jeans are not the characters in this book. The characters are cops and the girls they love or fuck, all kinds of cops, old cops, ex-cops, bent cops, divorced cops, cops behind desks and cops in cars, listening in on smart guys-turned-businessmen they are trying to put away…cops in the small towns of Massachusetts.
A description can also be a back road to the mind.
He watched her as she watched back into Electrical… across to Aisle Four … He’d seen women with shorter hair in Harvard Square, maybe Jamaica Plain, even bald, in recent years… When he was in uniform they’d give him hostile looks, waiting for him to make a comment… He’d just shrugged. No stranger than being a cop, walking the streets in a uniform all summer, 15 pounds of gunbelt dragging at your hip. Harder, maybe. All the stares. Her hair was like the crewcuts they used to give kids, but soft, so you want to run your hand over it…
Not visual, not really: a haircut. Not in a book.
The Manhattan Beach Project by Peter Lefcourt read by Tom Weiner
An all but dead movie director, inspired by a creative CIA operative, flies to Uzbekistan to shoot a reality show about a mafioso war lord in the post soviet territories with problems. “Wife is bitch on wheel. Son wants to join fuckink Taliban. Daughter like pussy.” A perfect formula for good reality television in Central Asia.
Their suite at the Intercontinental resembled the vegas highroller suit relocated to Riyadh: the bathrooms were marble tiled with gold gilt faucets.. there was a sunken tub, a dozen white fluffy towels, and inlaid mosaics featuring jinns floating over mosques.
“We’re flying to Nukus tomorrow afternoon.”
“Where is Nukus?”
“About a thousand kilometers from here… on the way to the Aral Sea. It’s located in Karakalpakstan which is supposed to be an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan but isn’t. It’s run, if you could call it that, by the Uzbeck government. It’s hot, ugly, polluted — used to be the location of a secret Soviet chemical weapons factory, which for all we know is still toxic. They’ve got dazed camels wandering around wild on the outskirts of town. The best hotel looks like a rundown Ramada in Utah. They got running water only 6 hours a day. The only place to eat is a Korean noodle restaurant where you got about a 50/50 chance of not getting ptomaine poisoning. And the whole town smells from rotting cotton and chemicals.”
“Sounds great.”
“You don’t find warlords in places with five star hotels.”
…
When they land in Nukus, which looks like a deconstructed Stalinist version of Tuscaloosa, without traffic or traffic lights, Charlie Berns (the not so dead director) hires a Polish lesbian camera woman, who falls in love with the warlords daughter. The warlords wife never leaves her tent so they write her into the script as recovering from plastic surgery in Tashkent, the warlord’s son rebels against his father to join the Taliban so they write him up as running away to law school, to escape the family business… The show becomes a hit, and is stopped only when the entire crew of Entertainment Tonight, along with the warload’s private army, the line producer and the CIA operative are held in seige in a bar in Turkmenistan by heavily armed America-hating religious fanatics, staging a jihad against profane reality television.
Another nifty look at the Hollywood sausage factory, read by Tom Weiner who sounds like he has a piece of fatty lamb Kebob swimming in his mouth.
Going to Bend by Diane Hammond read by Hilary Huber
Even if you buy all your clothes at Walmart’s, even if you never finished high-school and you still collect Happy Meal toys, even if your little girl never saw her father, who thinned out after a while, like smoke, you can still write a recipe book. Then someone with Aids, who drives an old Peugeot, can market you and the kitchen you cook them in. “When the people of Sawyer tucked into a meal or a snack, 72% selected a Pepsi product to go with it…” This was one of Schiff’s contributions to the universe, to Oregon, because Schiff, who grew up hungry and insulted by his mother, was a magician when it came to marketing. …
J.M. Gregson: The Inspector Lambert Series
Deliciously understated English murder mysteries against a background of Hereford cows and curmudgeonly coppers. Here’s a taste:
Bastard, bastard, bloody stupid game! He beat the turf with his five iron and considered dispatching it after his golf ball into the undergrowth. Then he trudged on morosely, feeling the blood pounding in his head. A balanced equable man reduced by the trials of this slow quiet game to a murderous lunatic.
One taste might be enough, though.
Vino Veritas, A Good Walk Spoiled, An Academic Death. It is the same story over and over again, populated by the same types: the murdered man is a lecherous and successful jerk, unloved by his wife, his workers, or his women. He leaves a trail of immoralities behind him, which the plodding Gloucester policemen unearth and convert into sharp shiny clues.
Blood in the Water by Jane Haddam read by David Collacci
A delightful, witty murder mystery about a small-town gated-community studded with the usual sociopathic suspects, albeit wealthy, and gorgeous social commentary. Waldorf Pines is an exclusive ex-1920’s ex-golf-course on which marbled kitchens and bathrooms have been built, bricked over with Tudorish frontage and populated by odd, classless, moneyed characters badly acting out their reality-tv-prototypes.
She’d once thought that all that mattered to them was money, but this wasn’t true. All that mattered to them was to be seen by other people to have money. They had not learned- if they were lucky they would never learn — that money is never enough if that is all you have.
And then there is Gregor Demarkian. A retired FBI officer hired by police departments to help them with their inquiries…..
Frank Muller reading Chains of Command by William Caunitz
Frank Muller reading William Caunitz
Just a paragraph. Listen to Frank Muller saying: “All in a day. It’s almost like there’s a puppet master pulling all our chains.”
Somehow, he lets the sense roll in and then rides it with his voice so that the words are gathered up in a huge wave which crashes down at the end of the sentence. Not a book but a storm. Not any beach, but the Pacific.
Hanging by a Thread by Monica Ferris read by Susan Boyce
She sounds like your high school Home Economics teacher, or the Hall Mother in your college Dormitory, or your new semi-retired accountant: clear, crisp, well organized and about 23 pounds overweight. She sounds pretty and pinkish and lipsticked. She is in her mid fifties and owns a Needlework Shop in Minnesota, which is confusing and full of lakes and coldish people. She has also developed a refreshingly useful talent for finding the truth about a murder. She never takes money, admits her amateur status, and uses nothing but her friends and neighbors and her clear, crisp, organized accountant’s mind as sources of information. She makes you feel like your world is only temporarily messy, and can be good as new and cute as a button if you just found her kind of Mary Poppins — inside your head. Good luck.
Also Recommended: Crewel World (the first and best of the Needlecraft Mystery series), A Stitch in Time, Buttons and Bones, A Murderous Yarn
The Accident by Linwood Barclay read by Peter Berkrot
A bouquet of accidents pop up at the beginning of the story: a cab crash in Manhattan, a car crash in Darien, Connecticut, an overdose in Mitford…For the rest of this story, the notion of accident is under erasure. What after all is an accident? Is the housing crisis an accident? Is the use of sub-paar Chinese building materials substituted for the good American stuff an accident?
Everywhere in the background is the restless problematic of wives and husbands struggling to maintain their position in a post-pastural not quite upper suburban middle class. .. An accidental class, in an accidental economy.
As in other Linwood Barclay tales the wife is either dead, missing or dissimulating: here the dead wife has been found inexplicably drunk behind the wheel of a crashed SUV. Husband and daughter are gobsmacked. Who was she if she was an alcoholic?
Who was his wife? Who were her friends? Their husbands? Their neighbors? Doubt turns all things ordinary into mysteries, even in Connecticut.