Sukey's Favorite

The Sound of Movies

A boatload of audio thrillers

Reviews by Sukey Howard

Faye Kellerman puts a unique twist on the Nick and Nora Charles mysteries. Instead of the martini-drinking, cigarette-puffing, super-sophisticated couple of the "Thin Man" series, the couple she created for the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus novels are orthodox Jews, super-observant and super-smart. But, like Nick and Nora, this fascinating twosome seems to get caught up in some serious murder cases. Peter, who converted to marry Rina, is an LAPD detective, Rina, his moral, beautiful wife, dabbles in detection herself. In "Serpent's Tooth," Kellerman's latest, Decker is investigating a horrific mass shooting in an L.A. restaurant. A psycho killing randomly, or a set-up to obscure a purposeful murder? As Decker delves, he finds himself dealing with the rich and savvy, but not very savory, who try to stymie his every move and smear his reputation. Jay O. Sanders, always an able reader, is again here.


Michael Devlin is a good Irish Catholic boy, Rabbi Judah Hirsch is a good Jewish man from Prague. Michael lost his father in World War II, Rabbi Hirsch lost everything. They meet on the mean streets of Brooklyn in 1947 and form a strong if unlikely friendship. But it's no more unlikely than Pete Hamill's writing a novel dusted with the magic of Yiddish folklore. "Snow in August" is that novel, and it is sad and sweet and triumphant, a delight that falls somewhere between fable and fiction, that takes listeners into the heart and dreams and wonder of an 11-year-old boy. Hamill evokes that time and place with assurance and draws his characters with tender compassion. It's the kind of story that should be read aloud as it is here.


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A culinary crime caper! What a great combo -- how often do you get menu tips and recipe ideas while listening to a well-plotted mystery? I guess as often as Diane Mott Davidson's novels come out on audio. In "The Grilling Season" all is simmering along well for Goldy Schultz, caterer par excellence, loving mother of Arch, ex-wife of Arch's father, John Richard, a super-handsome M.D. with a nasty habit of battering the women in his life, and now happy wife of a homicide detective. Then, Goldy discovers the very dead body of John Richard's current girlfriend, and high muckety-muck in the HMO he works for. Given his proclivities, John Richard is the prime suspect. He loudly proclaims his innocence, and Goldy, at the plaintive behest of her 14-year-old son, begins to make her own inquiries. While Goldy cooks up a storm in her kitchen, her extracooking activities stir up a storm that get her into serious trouble, the kind that can't be cured by a dose of her chocolate comfort cookies (recipe included).


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"The Autobiography of Foudini M. Cat" is a charmer, and so is Foudini who can take his rightful place among the growing number of talented animal authors. Though it is possible that Foudini got a bit of assistance, at least in using the computer, from Susan Fromberg Schaeffer. Here, Foudini has graciously decided to share his accumulated wisdom and life experiences in the human world, from his humble beginnings as a scarred, skinny kitten hiding in a laundry room to master house cat, sleek, spoiled and totally beloved. Though Foudini understands human language and tells his story with style, he remains very much a cat, not a person in cat's clothing. He's big on insights -- into cat behavior (you say, "I have a cat" but that cat says, "I have a person"), human behavior from a cat's perspective (meowing humans say very silly things) and into those things, like love, that transcend species. David Hyde Pierce, of "Frasier" fame, reads and makes a purrfect Foudini.


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March grew up with Hollis, a street-tough (or maybe worse) orphan her father brought into their home in Jenkinstown, Mass. They fell in love as teenagers with an obsessive, overheated passion; he was her one and only, she was his. But Hollis, driven by the demons of a ferocious pride, left to seek his fortune, and when, years later, he came back, she was gone, loving him still, but worn down by waiting. In "Here on Earth," Alice Hoffman's recently published twelfth novel, March, with her teenage daughter in tow, returns to Jenkinstown for a funeral after a 20-year absence. Hollis, now the wealthiest, but not the kindest, man in town, waits for her to come to him . . . and she does. I'm not giving anything away -- you know from the outset that the pull is too strong for either one to resist and you also know that their obsessive love is doomed. Yet, the story itself has an obsessive appeal, and enough well-drawn characters and intertwined subplots to keep you totally tuned in to Susan Ericksen's able performance.


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When John Bentley Mays' Aunt Vandalia died, he returned to Louisiana from his self-exile in the North, to memories and unexplored feelings about his deep southern origins and southern paths of being. The journey back to his Aunt's deteriorating house was the beginning of a journey that Mays had not planned on making. It marked a "long season of remembering," a summons by ancestral voices to see and experience the Tidewater region of Virginia where his ancestors cleared land 400 years ago, the colonial plantations of antebellum relatives, the towns in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana of family members now long gone. In "Power in the Blood: Land, Memory and a Southern Family" Mays takes us with him over the route to his roots, to his understanding of the meaning of heritage, connection with places, from the child he was to the man he has become. Mays reads his family memoir, and you can hear the depth of honesty and emotion he put into it.


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Sukey's Favorite

At the end of "Larry's Party," Carol Shields' wonderful new novel, Larry, now 47 and an acclaimed designer of horticultural mazes, looks at the guests, including his two ex-wives, gathered around his dinner table and still isn't sure who he really is or how he got to where he is. Not just to this party, but to this place and time. Shields tells Larry's story in layered chapters, each about a specific time in Larry's life, each referencing the past. As she scrolls through his life -- miserable adolescent, baffled young husband and father, successful professional, remarried, divorced again -- she follows his mistakes, the turns taken and not, his mostly futile attempts to understand the intricacies his own mazelike life, with affection, empathy and gentle laughter. She reads "Larry's Party" in the same manner, and you leave the Larry's table -- very reluctantly.


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The sound of movies

If you missed the film or want more of the story, listen in. Even a three-hour audio abridgment is much longer than the movie version of the book. Here are the latest:

Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month. Don't miss her audio reviews on CNN's "Sunday Morning."

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