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Summer listening is easy on the ears
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Michael Connelly Time Warner Audiobooks, $39.98 12 hours, ISBN 1586212036
By far the best noir
By Raymond Chandler $29.95, 7.5 hours ISBN 1590070895
Playback By Raymond Chandler $25, 4.5 hours ISBN 1590070976
Mr. Leader
By Robert A. Caro Random House AudioBooks, $32.95 9 hours, ISBN 0553712918
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LAPD detective Harry Bosch is a good cop and a good guy. He's tough, serious and wants to make a difference in this indifferent world. If you haven't met him before, you've missed out, and if you have, you know you're tuning in to prime time crime. City of Bones, the latest in Michael Connelly's Bosch series, gets high marks from me. A dog finds a bone; the dog's owner, an elderly doctor, recognizes it as human and calls the police. Harry gets the case and gets involved in a homicide that happened more than 20 years ago. The recovered bones belong to a 12-year-old boy who had been brutally abused for years and then murdered. Harry, saddened and maddened by such cruelty, vows to get the killer despite the long cold trail. And get him he does, but unearthing the past can hold dangers for the diggers, too. Well-crafted and well read by Peter Jay Fernandez.
Philip Marlowe, hardboiled private eye, student of the seamy underside
of L.A., cracking wise and rooting out lies, was jaded and cynical when
he came on the scene in 1939. Now the Raymond Chandler novels and short
stories that made this iconic detective and his masterful creator an
important part of our culture have been reissued by New Millennium Audio
on cassette and CD. The 12 volumes (some abridged, some not) are all
read by Elliott Gould who played Marlowe in the movie version of The
Long Goodbye, and who keeps on playing him perfectly in these audio
performances. From Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep to his
last, Playback, there are beautiful blondes and well-endowed
redheads, along with blackmail, murder, fraud and the distinctive
dialogue and hard-edged humor that became the genre's mantra and model.
If ever there was a politician who understood power, knew where to look for it and how to use it, it was Lyndon Baines Johnson. If ever there was a biographer who knew how to chronicle such a politician, it is Robert A. Caro. Master of the Senate, the third volume in his monumental biography of LBJ, is as exciting and fascinating as a superb novel. More than just biography, it's a study of the Senate itself and the particular kind of power that Johnson wielded there from 1949 to 1960. The lean, cocky, vibrant junior senator from Texas wanted power, and he would do anything to get it. He could cajole and charm, be humble and obsequious and, when confident of his position, bully, threaten and domineer. The LBJ portrayed here is ruthless, deceitful and proud of it, but he's also the man who mastered an institution that stood staunchly against social justice and, as its leader, "made the Senate not only work, but work toward a noble end." Stephen Lang's reading, punctuated with wonderfully accurate accents, adds to the unsparing brilliance of Caro's text.