The
Spoken Word

Let's hear it for a new year

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Tom Wolfe is best known now for his two big novels -- big in scope, big in size, BIG in sales -- but he started his writing life in the early 1960s, wowing readers with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby and using his coolly cogent, bright, biting style to become a leader of the New Journalism pack. Though A Man in Full appeared just two years ago, Hooking Up is the first collection of shorter Wolfiana for his eager audiences in 20 years. The seven essays included in this audio presentation, read by Ron Rifkin, are provocative; he snarls, snickers, never hesitates to show his teeth and manages to be interesting, aggravating, stimulating and scathing. Wolfe's lifelong obsession with the American scene is fully in play here -- you may not agree with him, but he will stir you up, make you look more carefully at your world and make you think. And that's not a bad way to start this new year.


Dave's delights
Dave Barry is also totally enmeshed in the American scene, but he finds unending humor in the small, everyday absurdities and shares his observations of the odd and the ordinary in his weekly syndicated columns. His most recent collection of columns, Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down, read by Dick Hill, is the perfect antidote to feelings of post-holiday angst and anxiety, doom and gloom. Not much escapes his wily wit, from the eternal differences between men and women, fathers and sons, to a lost U.S. Army missile launcher, dot.com zillionaires who barely shave, his recurrent pet peeve, Leonardo DiCaprio, and his own daily participation in the human comedy.


Who killed Dr. Death?
Jonathan Kellerman knows the answer and his fans will too when they tune in to his latest, wonderfully crafted mystery novel, Dr. Death, wonderfully performed as always by John Rubinstein. Eldon Mate, a Kevorkianesque doctor who gloried in the notoriety that assisting in assisted suicides brought him, has been murdered in his own van, hooked to his own "humanitron," the death machine he used to provide "silent passage" to the other side. Milo Sturgis of the LAPD caught the case and, given its extreme psychopathology, called in his friend, psychologist Alex Delaware. Dr. Mate wasn't just murdered; he was vivisected with great care by someone who has taken premeditation to the max. This is no easy case to solve -- making things tough for Alex and Milo, but all the more suspenseful and involving for listeners.


The examiner examined
We last left Kay Scarpetta, chief medical examiner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, concerned and committed foe of the criminal world and star of Patricia Cornwell's super-selling series, just minutes after she had thwarted the perpetrator of the Werewolf murders, a mutilating monster closely tied to a major French crime family. As The Last Precinct, read by Roberta Maxwell, opens, Kay is trying to recover from the attack, only to discover that she is under suspicion for a grizzly murder herself. Is someone other than this sadistic killer out to get Kay? Is she getting too close to making the kind of connections that will expose intrigue at a broader level, one that also involves the heinous death of the FBI investigator who was her lover? Cornwell, at her best in this one, has constructed an increasingly convoluted plot that will keep you guessing and cleverly leaves the door open for a spine-tingling sequel.


Smoke and mirrors
Robert Ludlum is a master manipulator of both smoke and mirrors -- and always puts some fire in the reflections. In his latest, The Prometheus Deception performed by renowned audio narrator George Muller, Ludlum comes through with another chiller-diller of a thriller. Welcome to the Directorate, a shadowy counterintelligence group that's extra-legal, unsupervised and unregulated. The men in charge fervently believe in democracy and they'll do anything to secure it. Nick Bryson, a brilliant agent put out to pasture after 15 years of hair-raising covert action, fervently believed in the Directorate. Suddenly, Nick is called back to investigate his old group and asked to go undercover in a world where nothing is what he thought it was. As events careen from Washington to Moscow, the Middle East to China, you'll begin to wonder too what is where and who is who.


The author of Tales of the City returns
No one tells better, sweeter, more honest, contemporary tales than Armistead Maupin. Now, after eight years, he's back with The Night Listener. Gabriel Noone, a successful spinner of serials about gay life and love in San Francisco that are read on the radio -- much as Maupin did with this one -- tells the story. In a kind of mid-life limbo after the departure of his longtime lover, Gabriel develops an intense phone friendship with Pete, a gravely ill 13-year-old boy who has written an astonishing memoir about his physical and sexual abuse. Gabriel and Pete talk as father and son, giving each other strength, understanding and love. Then doubts creep in when Gabriel can't get to meet Pete. What if this disembodied voice doesn't belong to the boy, what if there is no real Pete? Maupin and mystery? Not exactly what you'd expect, but he's done it so compellingly, you won't want it to end. If we're lucky, Maupin will bring Gabriel Noone -- and Pete? -- back again and soon. (Beware -- there is explicit sexual discussion.)


Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.

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