Butchers Hill by Laura Lippman ready by Deborah Hazlett

The skinny long legged girl with patch pockets shimmies down the fire escape to meet him, and hovers just a little bit above the ground, hanging, swinging above Castle street, in his dream, and forty years ago. After the dream, the old man wakes up, and hears the neighborhood kids destroying the neighborhood. He jumps down to the sidewalk, and shoots up and into the night at them. One of the kids dies. He sweeps up the broken glass in front of his house before he man goes to prison.

He is Tess Monaghan’s first client. She needs the business. Her second client is a sassy business woman and a liar. But Tess takes her case too.

The past comes back like a prisoner or a dream. There is no place for it, no place to put it.

You’ve Been Warned by James Patterson & Howard Roughan Read by Ilyana Kadushin

Another New York City nanny? No, no. This one wakes up screaming every morning, unable to stop the dream of a body bag around a not yet dead body. This one is having an affair with the father of the children she is nannying. This one sees cockroaches crawling on her body, and dead fathers watching her from across the street, and transparent bodies in photographs. Because this is New York, this “weirdness” mixes in with all the other weirdnesses in the city and what, after all, are a few hallucinations when you spend your days behind a camera. That’s right, this nanny is also a photographer, who shoots first and thinks later.

So Christian wakes up screaming, every morning, not because of what she sees, but because she cannot do anything about what she sees. The terror, the suspense, come from the inability to act.

The guilt and the hallucinations come from the inability to stop acting.

Still Life by Louise Penny read by Ralph Cosham

Even little old Canadian villages have murders, and artists. Jane Neal lived and painted in a big house and kept both her canvases and her home private. Except for the kitchen. To it she invited her circle of friends and fellow-artists, poor and English speaking. They and their language migrate to Three Pines to continue the war between French and English sensibilities.

The death of Jane Neal re-invokes these French and English factions, in a series of tense encounters between Police Inspector Gamache and the local folks: the usual suspects.

The plot is crisp and economical, but the descriptions are sweet, pastoral, even poignant. We want to know who murdered Jane because we like her more and more as we reconnoitre her life.

Every day for Lucy’s entire dog life Jane had sliced a banana for breakfast and had miraculously dropped one of the perfect disks to the floor where it sat for an instant before being gobbled up….Every morning Lucy’s prayers were answered, confirming her belief that God was old and clumsy and smelled like roses… and lived in the kitchen.

A Deeper Sleep by Dana Stabenow read by Bernadette Dunne

The Ninilta Native Association is run by Aunties – fierce old women who knit and protect native women and define the small life of the large territory called The Park. One of the Aunties belongs to Kate Shugak and functions, among other things, as a creditor.

We give you time, Katya. You almost get killed when you stop bad man . . . and you come home to heal. Ok we let you heal. We even give you puppy to let you heal. You fight with your Imah. She dies. We let you mourn. Your man die. We let you mourn some more. Your house burn down. We build you another. We give you life, we send you to school, and then instead of coming home like you should have you take job in Anchorage… What about us? Your people?

Kate knows well that the human geography of the Park is a map of old and odd relationships, and that these relationships are to the right and to the left and to the side of the law that comes from the State.

What wasn’t Park was wilderness and what wasn’t wilderness was wildlife refuge. Less than one percent of it was privately owned…

A fraction belongs to those who came during the goldrush in 1898 when the Park was created around them. Another fraction belongs to the native Alaskans who traded the right of way to oil for money and land. These are called Park Rats.

Among these Rats is a murderer. Find out who…

Next by Michael Crichton read by Dylan Baker

Increasingly, the essay, the critique, the report and the annunciation are being reconfigured in the form of fiction.

Michael Crichton has mastered this form. His Next is more than a story about the re-distribution of genomes; it is Critique, Satire, Farce and Science Report, with:

  • just the right amount of irony in representing jerks, like Brad the idiot nephew who attaches to underage teens, and relies on his rich uncle for jobs, cars, and bail;
  • just the right amount of irony in depicting the social-emotional infantilism of scientists who can’t navigate their way out of their self-made moral sinkholes;
  • just the right amount of Hollywoodability in scenes with children, animals and cars;
  • just the right amount of Doris Day type silliness in domestic showdowns between a sorry husband and his forgiving but disciplinary wife: here Blondie accepts the half-son, half chimpanzee Henry has brought home from the Lab, welcomes her role as Mommy, and scolds Henry for not thinking ahead.
  • just the right amount of mad British eco-alienated humour to work its way into the next Cadbury or British Air commercial…

(more…)

The Shadow Catcher by Marianne Wiggins read by Bernadette Dunne (!)

I am reading, no hearing, a beautiful book where a photograph is described:

This is us when we are happy is not the message that Alice Roosevelt’s wedding delivers…and unlike Alice Roosevelt who continued to be an unrepentant thorn in her father’s side even after Teddy’s death, all the Curtis children never stopped believing “Chief” could do no wrong, never stopped believing Chief was the perfect father, even after absences of many years, never stopped seeking Chief’s approval.

The woman who gives this sharp, tenderized commentary on Edward Curtis, father, renegade husband and shadow-catcher is at the wheel of a car in L.A., stuck in traffic. She tells us about Edward with the same familiarity that she tells us about the shortcut (Fountain Avenue) she will take, the shortcut everyone takes, the shortcut each of the 30 million drivers currently sharing the road believes that they alone discovered.

He became, she tells us,

by disappearing from their daily lives, not a father but the myth of one, a myth they needed to believe in to survive. And despite his actions, despite all contrary evidence, they needed to sustain that system of belief even if it meant altering their memory, creating a false memory, a false identity of who their father really was. If Edward, the disappearing father was to play the good guy in their system of belief, then someone anyone had to play the villain because surely there was real unhappiness in their home in everything around them… and someone , never dad, no never him, someone else had to take the blame… the person who was too tired to cook dinner after working all day long, that other unromantic parent asleep at the stove in her flannel slippers, stressed out and exhausted: mom….”

And as she drives and thinks and turns her thoughts over, and over, she assembles the person of Edward Curtis, and how this photographer intersects with the structure of the family, how he poses and positions himself within the family so as to appear a certain way, to seem a certain way. This seeming was in fact his art.

It is no wonder that there is an aura of indeterminacy surrounding this shadow-catcher, an uncertainty arising from the distance he put between himself and his world, himself and his own century.

And with this distance comes a mystery, a puzzle which is reconnoitred but not entirely solved by the story we are told about a man who sets up a photography studio in Seattle just after the fire…

The Mistress of the Art of the Dead by Ariana Franklin read by Roslyn Landor

Before Patricia Cornwell, before CSI, did anybody read dead bodies or examine them for traces of their killer? Yes, as it happens. Where there are bodies, there are secrets and where there are secrets, there are readers. Gaudinus the African, for example, who remembers people only by diseases, and greets his visitor from Palermo, the personal secretary and keeper of the King’s royal secrets such:

“Hemorrhoids!!” He said triumphantly, at last. “You had piles. How are they?”

Hemorrhoids distinguishes Mordechai Fils Barachia, who brings news of the murders of children in Henry II’s England. Representing the King of Sicily, Mordechai calls for a medical examiner, a reader and decoder of dead bodies, a Mistress of the Art of the Dead, to go to England and find out if indeed it is the Jews are the murderers of children.

Critical by Robin Cook read by George Guidall

For years the facile, monarch-note like introductory blurbs of audiobooks have been aimed at delayed airline passengers looking forward to a two or three hour seat in a jet on hot tarmac. As nonlocalizably uninformative as the pilot, but more or less referential.

The introduction to Robin Cook’s Critical marks a new slovenly low for the Recorded Books label, with its mistaken reference to “Jack’s heart operation”. (Dear editors: There is nothing wrong with Jack’s heart. Not in this book. It’s a different body part being operated on. Really. )

One sure sign that a publisher, or a civilization, is going down the drain is when it’s references are wrong. Another is when medics start talking about an innate sense of ethics. Ethics is a form of action, a set of practices and reflections based on habit and training. Ethics is not a sense. Nor is it innate — in the newborn –or in the coat closet. It is not inside anything because it is not a body, not a thing that occupies space.

But if it did occupy space, it would not be space in New Jersey, where Robin Cook has been spending too much time and where Critical gets its goombahs, its bad guys, its evil. The good guys are of course in New York, doing autopsies, solving crimes and playing Dick and Jane, medical examiners….

Somewhere in between are the doctors. And the entourage of bureaucrats who settle into their attached positions like feudal serfs, and the moneylenders, insurers and staph infections which prop up and support the institution of medicine in a big city.

The Fifth Vial read by Michael Palmer read by J. Charles

There is more than one mystery here. First, how does one make sense of the handful of quotes from Plato’s Republic which are scattered about this book like annoying commercials for a new Greek candidate? Especially when there is no candidate. Plato’s ideas are credited with breeding a monstrous economy of organs, stolen from the many, given to the few, by a gang of happy scholars with an Old School knowledge of Latin and a gamey love of Greek nicknames and Latin roots. And here, then, is the second mystery: how would a greedy ruling class locate, trace and seize particular bodily organs for their own use?

Natalie Reyes, overconfident, overcompetitive, overaggressive fourth year medical student finds out how. We meet her on the day she challenges the diagnosis of a resident in charge. We watch her being summoned to the Dean’s office, judged and condemned by an informal medical school tribunal, and cut down like a too high stalk of wheat. Suspended for four months, she is sent by her boss to present a paper at a conference in Brazil. She lands in Brazil but never makes it to the conference.

Bad Luck and Trouble by Lee Child read by Dick Hill

Reacher heard the rack of the slide twenty feet behind him. He heard it very clearly. It was exactly the kind of sound he had trained himself never to miss. To his ears, it was a complete, complex split second symphony and every component registered precisely. The scrape of alloy on alloy, its metallic resonance partially damped by a flesh palm and the ball of a thumb and the side of an index finger. .. The grateful expansion of a magazine spring, the smack of a brass cased shell socketing home the return of the slide. Those sounds took about a thirtieth of a second to reach his ears, and he spent maybe another thirtieth of a second processing them. His life and his history lacked many things: he had never known stability or normality or comfort or convention. He had never counted on anything except surprise and unpredictability and danger. He took things exactly as they came for exactly what they were….

This perfectly tuned register and processor of mechanical sounds is Jack Reacher, calculator and decipherer of numerical messages, auditor and predictor of probable forces of character, probable explosions of personality, probable damage to friends and country. Reacher is a ‘restless’ ex MP who left his happy gang of Special Investigators ten years ago, and has an unsettled and unsettling personality. He does not believe in carrying a spare shirt: