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THE SPOKEN WORD
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD Crime-busting Brahmins
By Matthew Pearl Simon & Schuster Audio, $26 ISBN 0743517911
All in the family
By Rohinton Mistry New Millennium Audio, $45 17 hours, ISBN 1590072731
Don't mess with Mother Nature
By Michael Crichton HarperAudio, $39.95 13 hours, ISBN 006536969
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Matthew Pearl's dazzler of a debut novel, The Dante Club, is just what an historical thriller should be—a creative combo of edge-of-your-seat suspense, fully imagined characters, fictional and real, and an evocative, well-researched setting that takes you right into another time and sensibility. Here, the setting is the post-Civil War Boston of 1865. The characters include some of the great literary Brahmins of the time—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell among them—who are hard at work on the first American translation of Dante. The suspense comes quickly when their scholarly efforts are interrupted by a string of grizzly murders that exactly duplicate the dire torments described in Dante's Inferno. Intrigued and horrified, these elite intellectuals put their pens aside to go after the killer themselves. Add Boyd Gaines' perfect-pitched narration to this mix and you've got a soundly satisfying audio presentation—smart and exciting.
Papa, patriarch of a Parsi family, is dying slowly but irrevocably from Parkinson's disease. To escape the burden of his care, his two middle-aged stepchildren ship him off, unceremoniously, to his daughter, who lives in a tiny apartment with her husband and two young sons. Rohinton Mistry's new novel, Family Matters, elegantly and eloquently performed by Martin Jarvis, revolves around this difficult, painful situation. As Mistry brilliantly evokes the color, chaos and corruption of Bombay in the mid-1990s, he takes us into Papa's past, his reluctant submission to family pressure and the devastating repercussions of that submission—repercussions that tear at the fabric of family life in this generation, too. You'll be lured into an intriguing consideration of the ties that bind and the ties that blind and you'll meet characters so well drawn that, though their culture is foreign and exotic to us, they become as endearing and exasperating as members of our own families.
That may be a gross simplification of the cautionary message in Prey, Michael Crichton's latest blockbuster, but he does make it perfectly clear that the cutting edge may slice in deadly and unpredictable ways. In swift cinematic style, heightened by George Wilson's narration, we see what can happen when obstinate egotism, greed and self-delusion collide with up-to-the-minute nanotech, biotech and computer tech. The action unfolds in a remote molecular fabrication plant in the Nevada desert where a new class of self-reproducing nanoparticles—evolving at an increasingly alarming and increasingly aggressive rate—is being generated. We're in on the fight, hour by hair-raising hour, watching as this newly minted menace grows smarter and as the techies who recognize that these particles are a swarming, life-threatening, mechanical plague do battle with those who don't . . . or can't. Crichton, always on the mark, has done his research well and he informs as he entertains.