Sukey's Favorite

The Birth of Venus
By Sarah Dunant
Random House AudioBooks, $29.95
6 hours abridged, CD, ISBN 0739310534

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The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant is the kind of wonderful historical novel that captivates from the get-go, taking you into another time and into another person's sensibility. Dunant gives us a woman's view of life in early 16th-century Florence, when the city's devotion to luxury and glorious art was being challenged and denounced by the fundamentalist monk Savanarola. Through the eyes of Alessandra Cecchi, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, we see what it was like to fall in love with a poor, truly talented painter she could not possibly marry and then to be married off to a man who could not possibly love her. Alessandra is unusually bright, well educated and passionate about art. Her indomitable spirit prevails and makes for quite a tale, eruditely told and elegantly narrated by Jenny Sterlin.

Super summer listening

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Though every month is Audio Month for me, I'd like to celebrate this annual tribute to the spoken word by catching up on some good recent titles.

Dialogue to die for

Elmore Leonard is in fine form in his latest crime caper Mr. Paradise, read with the requisite cool by Robert Foster. Somehow Leonard—back in Detroit, his home turf, for the first time in 20 years—makes homicide, deceit, sex-for-hire, hired hit men and crooked lawyers seem appealing. And, for good measure, there's a good cop and a gorgeous girl, too. But, as always, what makes listening to Leonard so much fun is the incomparable combo of rapid-fire repartee, dead-on dialogue and a plot that walks on the wild side.


The anatomy of secrets

Elizabethan spies and spymasters mingle with super spooks from our own tumultuous time in Leslie Silbert's cleverly plotted debut thriller The Intelligencer, with excellent dual narration by Jan Maxwell and Alfred Molina. Handed a case that involves Christopher Marlowe, famed Elizabethan playwright and "intelligencer" in the Queen's secret service, Kate Morgan, grad student turned private eye with a CIA spin-off group, is in her element. While Kate investigates, we get a fascinating account of the multifarious machinations that surrounded Marlowe's murder in 1593 and the inside scoop on present day intelligencers.


Up in the air

Jerry Battle, the somewhat aloof narrator of Chang-rae Lee's Aloft likes to fly his plane over the suburban landscape where he has always lived. His meandering manner, perfectly voiced by reader Don Leslie, makes you feel as though you're in the air with him, circling in on his character as he talks about his long-dead wife, the ex-girlfriend he wants back, his daughter who refuses to face a life-threatening disease, his son who's running the family business into the ground, and his aging father stowed unhappily in a nursing home. Aloft offers a compelling view of self-made America today.


Rookie cop

If you're a Pelecanos fan, you've met Derek Strange before. If you're not already a fan, Hard Revolution, read by Lance Reddick, may make you into one. In previous books, we've met a mature Strange, a former cop now a successful African-American PI dealing with crime and racial strife on the mean streets of Washington, D.C. In this prequel, Pelecanos adds new and subtle dimensions to his main man who becomes even more interesting and complex.


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