The Land of Mango Sunsets by Dorothea Benton Frank read by Nanette Savard

Not all old women from the South are funny. Only the ones who know what they don’t want, and what they want:

All I want in this life is a reasonable man who’s self supporting, who’s nice to me, funny, you know, likes straight sex, not role playing modelled on a kinky Berlin night club from pre-World War II…

Dorothea (Benton Frank), like Virginia (Ironside, who doesn’t want to join a book club), has lived a life doing lots of things that other people want, and has decided to surrender her crossword puzzles, her unused silver, and her uptight charity friends, and rediscover her family, her mother country, and her self.

The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak read by Laurel Merlington

Whatever falls from the sky above, thou shalt not curse it. That includes the rain. No matter what might pour down, no matter how heavy the cloudburst or how icy the sleet, you should never ever utter profanities against whatever the heavens have in store for us. Everybody knows this, and that includes Zeli Ha. .. Rushing for an appointment she was now late for, swearing like a trooper, hissing one profanity after another at the broken pavements…

Incredible how 3, 4 sentences can cut open a life, a mood, a world. We read and are wet and late and Turkish.

Alice in Jeopardy by Ed McBain read by Bernadette Dunne

In Cape October during the rainy season, but May is not the rainy season, you can expect a thunder storm along about 3 or 4 every afternoon… The rain when it comes mercilessly assaults the sidewalk and the streets. . . But the heat and the humidity follow as closely behind the storm as does a rapist his victim. Within minutes, you’re sweating again. This is not the rainy season, this is May, but at 3 o clock that afternoon the rain is coming down in buckets.

A fundamental law of Hemingway holds true for Ed McBain: if it is raining at the beginning of the chapter, there’s going to be sex by the end of the chapter. McBain is edgier, angrier, and New York funny, even when describing South Florida.

Did you ever go to bed with Alice?
This is now 3 o’clock in the morning. Around 3 o’clock in the morning they all ask you to start cataloging all the women you’ve ever slept with.

McBain  chronicles telephone conversations, everyday speech,  questions, commands, exclamations : between widows and out of town businessmen and redneck cops, truck drivers and sisters in law, white trash and nosy neighbors and nosy reporters, the way a real estate agent shows off a house… or a Cape:

Every discourse as smooth as single malt Scotch on fast ice.

Kingdom of Lies by N. Lee Wood read by Ralph Cosham

Kingdom of Lies (Unabridged)
Length: 16 hours and 13 min.
Release Date: 05-03-2006

First: ignore the Audible summary. There is an office bureaucrat sitting in Bangalore who listens to audiobooks in between doing customer service calls for Verizon and emergency care calls for Viagra wives. Which explains summaries that sound as if they were based on hearing every third verb, badly. So, forget the summary.

This is a well arranged, nicely plotted detective novel, featuring a depressive Yorkshire cop of the John Harvey variety, divorced, dedicated, and dieting. He is comfortable in his own melancholy, his own territory, with his own defeat. His ex-wife’s robust ambition has moved her and their twins to a monied life in London. His neighbor’s wife irons his uniform shirts. His cat welcomes him home.

One day, a woman academic disappears while at a local conference; she turns up drowned and drunk and is identified by a pretty American colleague on vacation.

The Yorkshire seargent and the pretty American professor begin to investigate the dead woman’s death, and then her life, and then her taste for sad encounters.

The coupling is obvious, the end is not.

Sister Mine by Tawni O’Dell read by Renee Raudman

Hitachi’s beautifully directed High Definition video series called True Stories features a segment on “Coal’s Comeback”. A bunch of old em·phy·se·mic grandpas are fishing, muttering into the wind, when the voice of Bruce No of Hitachi America announces that Supercritical Technology is the new generation of Coal, the clean generation of Coal.

Then back to the toothless grandpas, “I want to make sure that when my grandkids go fishing … that they’ve got something to fish for”.

The whole thing, with the baseball caps and the feckless red neck river kid talking about his favorite fish and the plain unchanging faces of Cowdunk, America, is so heartfelt and hokey that it could be the opening show at the Democratic primary.

But instead it is the green, whitewashed version of an industry which corrupts every aspect of life in small Pennsylvania coal mining towns, where abused daughters grow up and sisters disappear and little girls dress like porn stars and don’t know why its wrong to try to sell their brothers in exchange for rides to the Mall.

Man in the Middle by Brian Haig read by L.J. Ganser

An insider’s view of the pentagon:

Three of the four military services have their headquarters within these walls… The underlying idea is that proximity will force the services to work together in neighborly harmony. And it would seem to make sense because after all the four military services perform the same basic mission, the same rudimentary purpose… And why it makes sense is precisely why it doesn’t work, we’re all vying for the same taxpayer bucks, pool of human talent, and opportunities to strut our stuff.

The Army is the oldest, the largest, the smartest, with obviously the most primo jag corps. The Marines are also fairly good guys. Primarily because they think like the army, except they’re a lot more hormonal… The Air Force, newest of the services, is like an orphan teen-ager with a fat trust fund. Prematurely arrogant and totally obsessed with all the cool shit they can buy. Nobody likes them but we all envy them. Last, our seafaring comrades, an overdressed yachting club whose main contributions to national security seems to be propping up bars and bordellos in strange and exotic ports.

Each service sees the world according to its strategic perspective… The Navy sees the globe as three-quarters water, with several largely irrelevant land masses called continents populated by quarrelsome people who somehow become scared shitless the minute an aircraft carrier rolls up off their shore.

For the airforce, the world is a really neat target range, conveniently dotted with cities and towns to stop stuff on, so long as it doesn’t interfere with happy hour…

And so the cynical, sharp, acerbic, acidic wit of the Jag officer investigating the suicide/murder of an officer….

A joint staff manned by officers drawn from the four services, are supposed to shelve their loyalties and their career aspirations, to direct the services to work together cooperatively, rationally and efficiently. This is like hiring the marriage counselor who’s fucking your wife to fix your marriage.

Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter by Blaize Clement, performed by Julia Gibson

Another silly and lovable murder mystery written by an out of work real estate agent? Well, let’s see: Dixie Hemingway is a 32 year old ex-deputy living Sarasota, Florida, with her brother, the fireman, and his lover, Pablo, an undercover cop. She is a certified and insured and licensed Cat sitter. She is paid $20 to feed a cat and change the litter once a day; $60 for an over night visit. She also walks dogs and hugs them goodbye. She takes pets seriously and avoids humans. She is, like most Floridians, recovering from humans. Like fat, mad mothers of suicidal children, or overpampered party girls who have aged into overpampered divorcees. Dixie is different. More cat than human; both more curious and curiouser.

James M. Cain and ‘Sexological Advertiser’

If ever there was a language of L.A., a language in which each noun, common or proper, is localized, dated, and cast in a Hollywood movie, it is the language of James M. Cain. And if Cain’s L.A. had a voice, she would sound like Christine Williams. She doesn’t sing, but she could be singing; she doesn’t hawk her words, but she could be a crier of the news that books hold; she doesn’t broadcast, but she could be advertising baby food or soap; or she could be doing all of these things. In her voice vibrates the radio hysteria of the 1920s, showy, fluttery, stagy, but fundamentally sweet and pure and hopeful. Indeed, it is the voice of a big country, of big spaces, with lots of land to cross, lots of square footage. Even indoors.

And so when Cain describes L.A., he talks about Glendale. The overspill. The life just outside the borders, looking in. As if all L.A. was really outside L.A., looking in.

The bathroom that he now whistled in was a utile jewel: it was in green tile and white tile, it was as clean as an operating room, everything was in its proper place and everything worked.

And before there were California girls, there were California women. They wore aprons over dresses, slips and stockings, they walked on pumps and pinned up their hair, even at home. They decorated cakes and cooked proper dinners, from scratch. They knew how to run a household and how to save money and how to mend things that broke. They had names like Mildred. And husbands like Pierce.