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Franco-American relations
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Diane Johnson Random House Audio, $25.95 6 hours abridged, cassette, ISBN 0739307797
Lawyer on the skids
By Henry Leyva Audio Renaissance, $29.95 6 hours abridged, CD, ISBN 155927994X
Please note: these audio titles may be available in formats other than the ones reviewed here. |
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Diane Johnson has had a great deal of fun focusing on the foibles, follies and faux pas of Americans in Paris. In her latest,
L'Affaire, read with an admirable combination of Gallic and
American accents by Blair Brown, Johnson moves her characters to the French Alps for the better part of the action, but never takes her
witty, wise gaze from the comedy of contemporary manners played out between the sexes as they stumble over cultural barriers and slam
into cultural stereotypes. Here, Amy Hawkins, a smart, pretty Palo Alto girl who made herself a dot-com fortune, goes to France to get
a sheen of sophistication and, perhaps, to have an affair that will ruffle her all-too-steady heart. Delightful, but never frothy, it
leaves you wondering what could be left after Le Mariage, Le Divorce and L'Affaire.
Bill Wyeth had been at the top of his game, a successful real estate attorney, living in luxury in a Manhattan apartment with his gorgeous wife
and baseball-loving eight-year-old boy. Then, in a freaky twist of fate, he lost it all—family, status and job. That's where Colin Harrison's
new thriller, The Havana Room, read most convincingly by Henry Leyva, begins.
Drifting in the city's murky corners, Bill finds himself hanging out in an old-fashioned New York steak house run by an attractive woman who,
late one night, introduces him to a man in immediate need of a real estate lawyer. An odd hour, an odd situation, but Bill's not in any condition
to turn down a potential job—and how could he know that this job would lead him into a maelstrom of mystery, malice, mind-bending connections
and, ultimately, to a face-off with death. Smart, dark, confounding and compelling.