The sounds of summer: fabulous fiction for summertime listening

Sukey's Favorite

God Is My Broker by Brother Ty, with the able assistance of Christopher Buckley and John Tierney, is irresistibly irreverent and offense may be taken, so caveat listener. That said, I have to admit I laughed so hard I had to stop jogging. This savvy send-up of the highly profitable prophets of self-help is one of the funniest audios I' ve heard. Brother Ty (short for Tycoon), a trader on the skids, leaves the Wall Street jungle for the serenity of a monastery in upstate New York only to discover that it too is on the skids--but not for long. Their Abbot, finding little solace in the scriptures, is deep into Deepak (Chopra, that is) while other monks are awakening the " giant within" a la Anthony Robbins or forming a coven of Stephen Coveyites. Brother Ty, whose hedge fund is reaching heavenly heights, gets his tips straight from the Almighty, and that leads to an explanation of the very apt subtitle--A Monk-Tycoon Reveals the 7 1/2 Laws of Spiritual and Financial Growth. Reader, Mark Linn-Baker has just the right spiritual stuff to imbue Brother Ty with a voice from on high.

God Is My Broker
By Christopher Buckley and John Tierney
BDD Audio, $23.95
6 hours
ISBN 0553479504

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REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD

An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears's highly acclaimed bestseller, has all the compelling elements of a superb literary-historical thriller. The scene, set with exquisite accuracy, is Oxford in the 1660s with Charles II restored to a shaky throne. The characters, some fictitious, some real, are created with flawless strokes and recreated for this audio with an equally flawless reading by Paul Michael. The mystery central to the story is the murder of a most unpleasant Oxford don, and you experience the happenings surrounding it through the eyes of four very different characters. This makes the plot, ingenious as it is, all the more intricate and the book all the more revelatory of the world as it was in 17th-century England.


Pamela Thomas-Graham gives us more in her debut novel, A Darker Shade of Crimson, than just a good mystery story; she takes us inside academia and lets us in on what it feels like to be young, black, gifted, and good-looking in an ivy league school that's almost all white and certainly up-tight (not unlike the author who graduated from Harvard and Harvard Law School with honors galore). Nikki Chase, the leading lady here, is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard. On the first day of the fall semester, Nikki stumbles over the dead body of the outspoken, controversial African-American Dean of Students at the Law School. Nikki, suspecting something more than a tragic accident, begins an investigation of her own and uncovers more than the ordinary academic acrimony and enmity. Hazelle Goodman plays Nikki most convincingly, and I hope she and Ms. Thomas-Graham will be back with an encore.


As Double Exposure, Stephen Collins's sexy, suspenseful new novel opens, Joe McBride, TV critic and divorced but devoted father, is suddenly having a lot of women trouble. His ex-wife is angry at him, his fiancee has just dumped him, and a stunning, unabashed colleague is about to upstage him in a career move. Then, he meets Amy--or is her name Nannie? Is she sweet, sensual, and sensationally seductive, or is she an edgy New York weirdo who can't seem to tell the truth? You'll find out when Joe does, and in the meantime you'll feel for him and reel with him as he tries to keep his life on a somewhat even keel. The New York backdrop is well done, and there's a great cameo appearance by a young Rupert Murdoch-like Aussie who wants to gobble up media. Susan Ericksen performs.


In The Abduction by James Grippando, Allison Leahy, U.S. Attorney General, is running for President, and her opponent is Lincoln Howe, retired four-star general and the first African-American to run for this exalted office (that's where the resemblance with Colin Powell ends). It's a close and nasty race (what else is new?), when suddenly the focus changes--General Howe's granddaughter is kidnapped and held for ransom. Allison, in her role as attorney general, is in the forefront of the search--and what's more, years ago her own adopted baby girl was kidnapped and never returned. As the election draws near, each side accuses the other of manipulating the tragedy to their own advantage. Recriminations fly, but nobody can come up with a scenario that makes any sense, until . . . Allison Janney's reading is well-paced and tension-laced.


The tension builds, too, in Sue Grafton's newest addition to her best-selling Kinsey Millhone alphabet mysteries. We're up to number 14, "N" Is for Noose, and Kinsey is up to her neck in trouble as she tries to put Selma Newquist's mind at rest. Selma's husband Tom, a good man and honest detective in the small town of Nota Lake, Nevada, died of natural causes, but he was deeply bothered in the preceding weeks. Not expecting much to come of her investigation, Kinsey soon realizes that something very wrong and very troubling was and is going on and that someone will do very nasty things to make sure that she doesn't find out what it is. " N" is for noose, but it's also for notable, in this case another notable, well-plotted whodunit from Ms. Grafton, read with easy assurance by Judy Kaye.


When do friends become lovers and lovers, friends? Joanna Trollope runs through some the permutations in her quietly affecting new novel, The Best of Friends. Lawrence and Gina had been the best of friends since they were teenagers, but Lawrence married Hilary and had three children, and Gina married Fergus and had a daughter. All four were friends for years, and their children followed suit. Then Fergus walks out on Gina, and a mini domino effect occurs. Lawrence, comforting his distraught best friend, discovers that he's in love with her and that his marriage too might be headed for dissolution. But it doesn't end there, no one walks off into the sunset wreathed in romance; rather, the confusion of lovers and friends gets sorted out in a salutary, civilized way. Davina Porter's narration echoes the compassion and charm of Ms. Trollope's story.


Nicholas Sparks, whose last foray into the mysteries of the heart, The Notebook, left us moved and teary eyed, does it again with Message in a Bottle. Can we love too much? I' m not sure you'll get the definitive answer, but you will get a heartrending, heart-warming love story, and you will need to have your hankies close at hand again. Theresa, divorced, still scarred by the breakup, finds a love letter in a bottle on a Cape Cod beach. Enchanted with the deep passion and pain it expresses, she searches for its author and, in the process, finds and loses much more than she ever imagined. Kathleen Quinlan and Bruce Boxleitner take turns reading.


A nonfiction special for the media mavens and observers of the Beltway battles, Spin Cycle, by Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz, is a not-to-be-missed, behind-the-scenes look at the Clinton White House.


Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.

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