Sukey's Favorite

The Yiddish Policemen's Union
By Michael Chabon
HarperAudio, $39.95
12.5 hours unabridged, CD
ISBN 9780060823566

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Michael Chabon's new novel, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, is brilliant, funny, heartbreaking in a uniquely offbeat way and wildly entertaining. Chabon's linguistic pyrotechnics dazzle, metaphor and simile bubbling up with astounding ease, coloring and contouring characters and landscapes, interiors and exteriors, allowing you to virtually touch, taste and experience the world he has created, and Peter Riegert's fabulous reading makes it all the more palpable. The time is now, but the setting is imagined: We are in the Sitka District, an autonomous region in Alaska set aside for 60 years in 1948 for Jewish WWII refugees after the new state of Israel fell. So time is running out and yet another diaspora is looming. Add to this brew of Yiddish culture, angst and Alaskan gloom; an appealing alcoholic, antihero detective; the murder of a heroin-addicted chess genius in a fleabag hotel, who may or may not be the Messiah; and a group of ultra-Orthodox gangsters determined to get the Holy Land back. Chabon has created a Yiddish version of noir, a sort of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett meet Isaac Bashevis Singer and Sholem Aleichem, and the result is extraordinary.

The afterworld of 9/11

REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

Falling Man, Don DeLillo's spare, affecting novel, is not listening-lite, not the kind of book you would call a "beach read," or, in this case, a "beach listen." But don't let that stop you—summer doesn't mean your brain is on vacation. Many novelists, some more successfully than others, have used the horrific events of 9/11, but DeLillo makes us see the day again and feel the trauma and disorientation and consider the world we have been left with and how we move on. And he does this with just a few characters: Keith, who makes it out of one of the towers on that bright blue morning, covered in ash, but unable to grapple with his post-9/11 life until he allows himself to remember it all in poignantly vivid detail; his estranged wife, Lianne, who opens the door to find him back in their apartment and more or less in her life; their young son who obsessively searches the sky for more planes sent by "Bill Lawton"; Lianne's mother and her arch-leftist German lover who quarrel about the "why" of it all. John Slattery's exemplary reading maintains and matches the muted black-and-white mood, and the technicolor finale.


Murder most foul

Don't confuse Tana French's skillful debut In the Woods with Harlan Coben's latest, The Woods, though there are a few grisly similarities. French serves up an intriguing, genre-bending psychological thriller in the form of a solid police procedural. Dublin murder squad detective Rob Ryan narrates as he and his bright, buoyant partner, and closest friend, Cassie Maddox, investigate the murder and rape of a 12-year-old girl, whose body was left on a Bronze Age altar at an archeological site in the woods near Knocknaree. Twenty years before, detective Ryan had played in these very woods until the ghastly day when his two best mates disappeared and he was found in blood-soaked sneakers, mute, never able to remember what happened. Keeping his childhood trauma a secret from everyone but Cassie, he works this increasingly complex case, looking for links to the past, hoping that lost memories might surface. Reader Steven Crossley gets the voices right, gives the characters depth and keeps you involved.


Best-selling sounds

Just in time to keep those dog days at bay, strong, sexy Lucky Santangelo returns in Jackie Collins' Drop Dead Beautiful, her latest foray into romance and revenge. Jackie and a full cast read.


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