Firewatch by Nelson DeMille read by Scott Brick

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 the end of the story there is a mission that takes advantage of this training, flawlessly. Some  gun nuts   make themselves into a group, which by the end of the story, activates a perfect plan to deceive and betray mankind, more or less.

Scott Brick has lost his whine and tells this story straight from the hip. de Mille tries to do the same old trick with the suspect and the detective  jerking each other off…. but it doesn’t really work. What does work are the emotional configurations between husband, wife, cop and friend, subject and country….

Try it.

Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons by Lorna Landvik Performed by Ruth Ann Phimister, Christine Mcmurdo Wallis, Christina Moore, Kate Forbes and James Jenner

Four narrators read back to back the recollections of five ‘Angry Housewives’ in Minnesota. Each voice adds to the prism of personalities which reflects how different five women sound from one another, even when they are reading the same books.

Unlike the women in Mary McCarthy’s The Group,  which was perhaps the first of this type of novel about women in a group, the housewives do not show the marks of a common institution. Marriage and motherhood are not finishing schools.

Although the story spans across three decades, this is not a history told through women or through books.  The Angry Housewives is a book club, but the books are pretexts for meeting and talking and eating and feeling and being.

And speaking. But narrators rarely get credit for being there. Not the narrators of this book, either. No mention on the CDs or the book cover or the Recorded Books web site of Ruth Ann Phimister, Christine McMurdo Wallis, Christina Moore, Kate Forbes and James Jenner. How very mean.

Rise and Shine by Anna Quindlen read by Carol Monda

This is a charming very digestable story about one sister told by another. The sister in the spotlight is a freckled lovable morning news show host, with a perpetual trousseau of people who dress her, praise her, and advertise her friendship. A black limo brings her from Central Park West to the television studio and back. The other sister rides the subway everywhere, works at a battered women’s shelter, and dates a cop. Her’s is a pedestrian perspective.

The poor sister looks at the rich sister succeed, and then, one day, fail. Accidentally on purpose, pretty, married, red-haired Megan Fitzmaurice says “fucking asshole” on morning TV, live, just before going to a commercial and just after interviewing a married California millionaire and his pregnant surrogate girlfriend.

It is not surprising that there is a release of glee and ressentiment from the usual fans and friends of the successful. What is surprising is the resentment the successful feel toward the incompetent, the ineffectual, the unproductive. Drunk but articulate, Megan tells her sister:

You’re the one who gets to have the illusions. I’m the one who has to deal with reality. That’s our deal. Someone has to be the bitch so someone else gets to be the nice one. Someone has to be the one who pushes so someone else gets to be the one who takes it easy. Someone has to be the driven one so someone else can take their time, and figure things out, and follow their bliss. ..Someone has to be in charge so someone else can relax. Someone has to be willing to do everything so someone else can do nothing.

This could be the New Yorker’s mating call. (Although it may have originated in New Jersey: “Trenton makes, the world takes”)

Interesting, eh? The huge burden of those charged with making things, and making things happen. Even when it seems as if they are only reading the news out loud.

At Risk by Patricia Cornwell read by Kate Reading

This short sharp tale of a dominant woman D.A. who loves political office far too well adds new personae to the genealogy of Cornwell’s anger. Monique Lamonte, a moneyed, manipulative, Harvardy alpha female; Winn, her cop investigator pretty boy with a tarot-reading grandmother and a taste for Hugo Boss and Prada; Sykes, a pugnacious fortyish blondy girl agent from Tennessee, and Miss Dog, part beagle part Shepard part deaf part blind neighborhood pet.

In the middle of orchestrating an “Any Crime, Any Time” campaign to solve old crimes and open old cases, D.A. Lamonte is raped.

How does a dominant female sound when she’s bound and spread-eagled on her own King size bed by a man with a pistol?

“I’m a whore. I’m nothing but a filthy whore…”

The stuff of fantasies for many Cornwell fans, no doubt. But all the sex takes place off-stage. And the only thing that’s really fantastic is the way forensics can read twenty year old ruffled panties a la DNA for evidence as accurate as it is damning.

Southern Living by Ad Hudler read by Cynthia Darlow

“Dear Chatter: To answer your question, when a Southerner looks at you with a blank smile and doesn’t answer you right away, it’s because he doesn’t trust you and he’s lookin’ you over and seein’ how much damage you can do as a human bein’…Have a nice day!”

Chatter is a kind of oral help desk published daily in Selby’s town newspaper: questions and complaints called in by local folks about Yankees and by Yankees about local folks.

Margaret Pinaldi, even tempered daughter of a militant feminist gynecologist from Buffalo, NY, transcribes the native messages with the sensitivity of an anthropologist and a degree in women’s studies. The combination of skirtiness and guile and slow, drawn out vowels describes a particular kind of Southern power with a female signature. When a Southern lady says: “Well, bless her heart!,” she means:

“she’s a bitch and I don’t like her and I’m fixing to say something awful about her. It’s like this: ‘Well, bless her heart! She’s got the fattest ass on the planet and her taste is all in her mouth but she does the best she can.’

Mothers, daughters, wives organize, decorate and manage Southern life from behind affluent decorating magazines and glasses of sweet tea.

A Yankee would call someone a fat slob. A Selbyite would say: “Now there’s a lady who likes her cheese straws and biscuits”.

Southern men can either accommodate them or be discontinued, like the dead appliances set on porches in South Selby “as if they’d been granted some (final) years in the sun after putting in all those years of work in the basement.”

The day’s Chatter is the popular subjective log of what people think in a class-conscious, gospelly mid-Georgia town. Meanwhile, the daily affairs of three women — a smart reporter, a poor, pretty, slightly scarred Kroger’s Supermarket employee, and a desperate, over-reaching, ‘old Selby’ wife — track what people say and how they behave. Cynthia Darlow piles on the twang and pulls out the drawl and turns simple sentences into terms of art. From red neck firemen, to poor white Southern good girls, to smart-ass Yankee reporters, to sensible daughters of militant feminist gynecologists, Darlow does Selby like Julia Child does sauces.

The roundabout way that most Selbyites communicate feelings and facts is not merely a matter of dialect or drawl. It is an altogether different way of being-with others. Consider, for example, the blunt, brutal directness of Margaret Pinaldi’s mother telling her daughter about her CATSCAN results:

Let me show you something.. She tapped the glass with the ball point pen… This is my left ovary… and this, this right here this white mass that looks like a supernova… this is a six cm necrotic mass with satellite lesions and I am totally, irrevocably fucked.

Finally, this is a manual for managers of feelings, a step by step guide on how to treat the truth differently, how to speak the truth, Georgia time.

The Afghan::Frederick Forsyth read by Robert Powell

As good as reading a short history of the rise and rise of the garden variety jihadist.
A retired SAS agent is mending the roof of his medieval barn when he is summoned to a final counter-terrorist mission. The medieval political system also needs mending. So begins a story about the “new cold war”:

The end of the cold war in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new cold war, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was experiencing birth pangs.

On one side there are computers; on the other are fanatics, and somewhere in between are a handful of men navigating oceans of terror. Occasionally a Predator drops in like Athena. Occasionally, a god loses his agent. It is never the other way around.

The Confirmation :: Thomas Powers read by George Guidall

It is not obvious that there are soldiers missing in action from the war in Iraq. It is said that the Arabs do not take prisoners, do not leave Americans alive. So the horror of a category of men archived by the subjunctive, neither real nor unreal, neither past nor present, neither recognizable nor localizable is an emotion associated with Vietnam, not Iraq. This is a mistake.

First, imagine the kind of paranoiac, legalistic, calculating Soviet Russia which could nurse a wounded Marine, but could not admit to his presence in the Soviet Union. Not without confirming their (illegal) presence in Laos. Not without confirming his (illegal) entry into the Soviet Union. Not without confirming his (illegal) imprisonment.

Second, imagine that news of this missing soldier arrives in Washington, but the soldier himself does not. Thirty years after Vietnam, a nosy busybody Jewish-Polish CIA hacker hag, with the chutzpah of someone who’s been around the block on heels, makes friends with a CIA boyscout and helps him find out why.

Iraq is not yet Vietnam, but wait.

The Accidental Tourist Anne Tyler::George Guidall

As the eighties crash down around him in images of newly divorced women and unusably long nails, Macon emerges as a peculiar species of American male bent on reorganizing the world. Author of guidebooks for businessmen who hate to travel, Macon Leary writes about the latest KFC opening in Paris and the whitest hotels in London. He works at home. He micro-manages his world and everything in it. He reduces foreignness. He is, in fact, a perfect mascot of a decade of globalization, OCD and telecommuting.

His son dies. His wife leaves. His dog becomes passive-aggressive. He meets an outrageous, frizzy, single mother who trains dogs and talks too much and wobbles on high heels. He takes her son shopping. He doesn’t change.

Ethan was dead and gone but Macon was still holding up shirts saying “This one?” “This one?” “This one?”