A Murder of Quality by John Le Carre read by Keith Lloyd

And it occurred to him that the most important thing about Rode was that he had no friends. Smiley was reminded of Buchner’s fairy tale about the child left alone on the Earth, who  finding no one to talk to  went to the moon because it smiled at him. But the moon was made of rotten wood. And when the sun and moon and stars had all turned to nothing he tried to go back to the earth. But it had gone.

Death in Holy Orders by P.D. James Narrated by Charles Keating

One reads, and reads, and reads… and one forgets how good it feels to consider the world through the jolly eyes of a clever and forgiving judge. P.D. James, for example.

Consider the small Anglican college of St Alselm’s, faithful not only to God and Church but to the immemorial tradition of English eccentricity.

Miss Betterton, sister of one of the fathers, is found at the bottom of the cellar stairs. Adam Dagliesh, ace investigator, investigates: Have you any idea what she was doing here, father?

Father Sebastian turned back and hesitated.
Then he said, “I’m afraid I have”. “Miss Betterton helped herself to a bottle of wine on a fairly regular basis… All the priests knew about it and I imagine that the ordinants … may have guessed. She never took more than one bottle about twice a week, and it was never the best wine. Naturally, I discussed the problem with Father John as tactfully as I could. I decided to take no action unless matters got out of hand. Father John regularly paid the price of the wine… Of course, we realized the danger the steep steps posed for an elderly woman. That’s why we had the stairs so brightly lit and replaced the rope with the wooden rails.”

Dagliesh said: “So, finding you had a regular pilferer in the community, you provided a secure bannister rail to facilitate the pilfering and to prevent her from breaking her neck.”

“Do you have difficulty with that, Commander?”

“No.”

Posted By:  ()  Date: 01/31/2005 11:15 am   

NIGHT FALL by Nelson Demille Narrated by Scott Brick

Like listening to a brand new Stones album (if you’re old enough to know what an album is…)

If a video of you coveting your neighbor’s wife captured the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 would you rally to the Flag and turn it in?

Night Fall is full of new and fun federal abbreviations (MFIC), NYC slurs (next to the Vietnamese place called Fuck U), and Arab jokes (What’s the difference between an Arab and a woman with PMS?).

So quotable the only thing to do is quote:
“….We’re not supposed to talk about anything sensitive in a taxi especially if the driver’s name is Abdul which is this guy’s name on his hack licence, so to pass the time I asked Abdul:
“How long have you been in this country?”
He glanced back at me, then replied: “Oh, about ten years sir.”
“What do you think happened to TWA flight 800?”
Kate said: “JOHN.”
I ignored her and repeated the question…..

John and Kate are married: “I strapped on my 9 mm glock which … is a copy of my old police issued piece. Kate strapped on her glock… Her’s is bigger than mine but I’m a very secure guy so it doesn’t bother me much.”

Special Agent Kate Mayfield and John have a healthy relationship: “The Federal government and all its employees are very sensitive to the rights and feelings of all minorities, recent immigrants, Native Americans, puppydogs, forests and endangered species of slime-mold. I, on the other hand, lack this sensitivity and my level of progressive thinking is stuck somewhere around the time when police regulations were re-written to prohibit beating confessions out of suspects. In any case, special agent Mayfield and I … do communicate. And I had noticed in the last year that we were learning from each other. She was using the F word more and calling more people assholes while I was becoming more sensitive to the inner anguish of people who were fuckheads and assholes.”

Kate and John are honest with each other:

Kate: “You’re putting on a little weight.”
John: “It’s the horizontal stripes on my tie.”

Kate and John do not have children:
“…the mobile playing ITS A SMALL WORLD was winding down and the kid was getting worried. He started making these sounds like he was yelling at the mobile to get moving. Marie stood and rewound the thing, cooing to me or to Junior: ‘Little boy loves his happy faces’. Twenty years from now, this kid was going to become a serial killer who hums Its a small world while he murders his victims.”

John does Bond:

I stood put on my jacket and said to Harry: “Beep me if some one calls a meeting.”
“Where you going?”
“On a dangerous mission. I may not return.”
“If you do, would you get me a Polish sausage on a stick?”

And Nelson Demille does funny. And its as wonderful as listening to a brand new Stones album (if you’re old enough to know what an album is…) Bravo!

Posted Date: 01/04/2005 8:51 am  

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False Memory by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang

If you’re going to murder somebody, ten to one there’s an old Cheez Doodle underneath the front seat of your car. Which is why Cheez Doodles have become some of the very best indicators of feloniousness among otherwise reasonable novelists like Dean Koonz, Jim Hall and Harlan Coben.

Think of the genetic misfit in Mr. Murder; the ex-mafia garrotist in Mean High Tide or the usurist’s thugs in Chinaman’s Chance. It’s not enough to be a psychopath, youve got to be a psychopath with a neurosis, a psychopath with a sweet-tooth, or a psychopath with a hard on for Frito-Lay.
Too often, the eating habits of terminally guided goons have taken a back seat to other seemingly more exciting personality traits…Narcissism, for example.
Consider the thoughts of the once beautiful assassin with the dreadful
new face in The Marching Season as the girls in the street, the waitresses, the laundrette,
stop looking at him, stop flirting with him, stop liking him. Tragic? No;
ugliness is just points to a misguided gene pool, a fucked up son, a joke
against a father.

From the Corner of His Eye by Dean Koontz read by Stephen Lang

Read by Stephen Lang who is good doing liddle giwls and the monotones of the personal(it)y disordered but not wonderful
doing Barty who is (we guess) the hero. Unless the real hero is: the theory
of quantum mechanics as interpreted by Feynman and the possibility of understanding
that things are always all the ways things are and we only sense some of the ways things are … sometimes.

It is possible that this book was written for the Koontz children or by the Koontz children … because it is difficult
to conceive that this is all there is after the wicked genius of FALSE MEMORY and the Topcat cooldom of SEIZE THE NIGHT.

Or maybe we only read the book some of the ways it could have been read and not all of the ways for which we apologize. Not that we didnt grin or giggle or laugh, with fangs on, listening to Jacob and Edom small talk of big disasters, earthquakes, tycoons, hurricanes, canned
hams…. Listen:

…he bolted up from the sofa saying “Canned Hams” but at once he realized this made no sense. None. ZIP. So he searched desperately for something coherent to say. “Potatoes.” “Corn Chips.” Which was equally ridiculous. So Edam plunged across the living room as though he were falling off a ladder, struggling to explain himself as he went. “We’ve brought some. There are some. I’ll get some if you wouldn’t mind having some. We have boxes in the car…but I’ll bring them in. Boxes of …boxes. Well, not boxes of boxes. Of course not. Its boxes of stuff, you know… Stuff
we’ve brought in boxes.” Yanking open the front door, lurching aross the threshold onto the porch, he thought at last of the word he needed and he cried out over his shoulder “GROCERIES!!!” with triumph and relief…”

DOLL by Ed McBain read by

Ed McBain’s DOLL  (Pouty D, drag the O, tongue heavy on the

L.)  is bedtime reading.

The warped, lusty, utterly female voice of this slut-goddess kicks you in
the groin, cuffs you to the radiator, and feeds you sex and ham sandwiches. You, or rather Steve Carella, who rarely gets tangled up with beautiful women who are not his wife.
“You belong to me, D-o-l-l” she says to Steve Carella. And you do. Or want to. As does Steve Carella, detective and good guy of the 87th precinct.
Because this dom, this pungent and powerful crook, and girlfriend of crook, tortures him,
addicts him to heroine and milks him for information. Incredible unequalled performance by a doll.

State of Fear by Michael Crichton read by George Wilson

Sharpen your pencils, open your looseleaf, sit up, take notes. This is an impressive, intelligent, well researched white-paper-thriller about silly, soppy, environmental theories and the well-funded, well publicized, well-established bureaucracies which profit by circulating them.

‘State of Fear’ is the coinage of a ‘Mental Ecologist’ whose hysterical critique of a toxic educational system and a Schumpeterian intellectual class is dead on.

There’s a cute, sissy lawyer; two femdoms; a kindhearted millionaire; and a handful of pissy, recognizable assholes: TV newsmen, marketing executives, graduate students, spoiled, wealthy wives with pet causes…..

Not idiot friendly. Thanks for that, MC.

Posted Date: 12/20/2004 8:09 pm   

P.S. I Love You by Cecilia Ahern Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

Holly is a youngish, prettyish, slightly loopy, Dublinite whose happy husband tells her what to do. Everybody jokes that if Gerry ever died, he would have to leave her a list … and when he dies, he does. Leave a list. Sort of. Holly is given 10 envelopes, with instructions, signed P.S. I love you….

Yes, it works. The instructions… and the story. Holly gets by with a little help from her friends. Sweet, well accented, light and funny.

Posted By: admin ()  Date: 12/08/2004 1:13 pm   Status: Open