Sukey's Favorite

The Photograph
By Penelope Lively
Highbridge, $34.95
CD, 7 hours unabridged, ISBN 1565117840

Buy or borrow this book!

Support your local independent bookseller

Find it in a WorldCat library

Compare prices at major online bookstores

The Photograph is Penelope Lively's 15th novel, but the first new audio presentation of her work in over a decade. Beautifully written, and wonderfully read here by Daniel Gerroll and Patricia Kalember, the story centers on lovely, elusive, impulsive Kath who died—you'll find out how toward the end—many years before the novel opens. Rummaging through a closet, Glyn, Kath's widower, finds a snapshot he'd never seen. In it, Kath and her older sister's husband are furtively holding hands. When, where, how, why? Glyn, whose neat scholarly world is severely shaken, sets off to ferret out the truth about Kath, first by confronting her sister, then by tracking down others in her life. And we meet them all—sister, husband, niece, old friends —characters who, memory by memory, produce a picture of Kath that none could have done alone. A literary listen—delicate, expressive and affecting.

The dark side of faith

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

In his latest book, Under the Banner of Heaven, which he reads here, acclaimed chronicler of mountaineering extremes Jon Krakauer trains his reportorial eye on the extremes of religion. Through the lens of the Mormon Church and its fundamentalist fringe, he focuses on homegrown extremism by weaving the story of two fundamentalist brothers—who claim they were motivated by God to slaughter their own sister-in-law and her infant daughter—with the story of the founding and rise of the Mormon Church. Both stories are fascinating. The history of this fast-growing American church, only 170 years old, is well documented and now the brothers' brutal crime is, too. The author offers chilling insight into the "tyranny of intransigent belief," a tyranny that, as we all sadly know, has growing relevance worldwide. Krakauer understands extremism and how to capture its essence in vivid narrative.


A trio of thrillers

Robert Tanenbaum paints his characters with a bold brush, especially Butch Karp, the six-foot-five chief assistant DA and his crusading, tougher-than-tough, lethally armed wife. They're both back in Resolved, the 15th installment of this best-selling series set on the edgy, mean streets of post 9/11 New York City. This time, an escaped psychopathic killer involved in a sordid, deadly deal with radical Islamic terrorists is after Butch and his family. Lee Sellars' narration keeps the pedal to the metal as Tanenbaum's trademark action hurtles on.

Faye Kellerman really knows her way around crime and the police who fight it. But what sets her Decker series apart is the way she's integrated the world of Orthodox Judaism into the mix; it gives her characters a depth and appeal not often found in this hard-boiled genre. In Street Dreams, ably read by Nancy McKeon, Cindy Decker finds an abandoned newborn in a dumpster while on patrol. A hunt for the mother leads Cindy to some life-threatening encounters with nasty L.A. gangbangers, but also to a life-enhancing, maybe life-changing, romance with a tall, handsome Ethiopian-Israeli.

Stan Pottinger's latest diller of a thriller, The Last Nazi, stars Melissa Gale, an attractive, ambitious lawyer who works for the Justice Department's "Nazi Hunters." She's been after "Adalwolf," once the protégé of Dr. Josef Mengele, since he surfaced in the U.S. six years ago and caused the strange, horrible deaths of three Americans—all Jews—from an incurable virus, a virus that had its abominable beginnings in Nazi labs. But who is stalking whom? Adalwolf seems as interested in Melissa as she is in him and that leads to the zigs and zags of chilling suspense, heightened by the fine-tuned performances provided by Paul Hecht and Maggi-Meg Reed.


© 2003 ProMotion, inc.
www@bookpage.com