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October's audio is "moon music" to the ears . . .
it's also a real scream REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Wally Lamb HarperAudio, $25 ISBN 0694519405 6 hours
By Allan Folsom Time Warner AudioBooks, $24.98 ISBN 1570425787 6 hours
By Barbara Vine Random House AudioBooks, $18 ISBN 0375403302 3 hours
By Carol O'Connell Brilliance, $28.95 ISBN 1561007978 15 hours
No brothers here, just a few ghosts Weird things started happening to Sweeney, an attractive, talented painter, about a year ago -- traffic lights immediately turn green, there's always a parking spot, and she knows the answers to Jeopardy almost before they're asked. That's the upside; the downside is seeing ghosts and talking to them. Even that's not too bad, but when Sweeney, in a sleep-like trance, paints a grisly crime scene, not knowing how or why she did it, she really begins to worry. Then the plot of Linda Howard's very engaging romantic suspense tale, Now You See Her takes a darker turn. Sweeney's next nocturnal foray yields an unfinished murder scene, corpse and killer without faces, and before she has another night to set it right, the actual murder has happened, and the victim is the estranged wife of the man she has just fallen in love with -- try explaining that to the NYPD. Talia Balsam's performance is right on, airy when it should be and scary when the tension mounts.
By Linda Howard Simon & Schuster Audio, $18 ISBN 0671582615 3 hours
A loup in the loop Nicholas Evans has done it again, this time whispering to wolves rather than horses. The Loop has many of the same elements that made The Horse Whisperer such a success -- high romance in Big Sky country, high adventure, an appealing male lead, an equally appealing female lead. But most appealing here are the wolves. The "loop" of the title refers both to the loop of life, the natural order of prey and predator, and to a horrid instrument used to trap and kill wolf pups (or does it echo the French word for wolf?). Needless to say, the introduction of these beautiful animals is not cause for universal joy, and when pro- and anti-wolf forces collide in cattle country it tears a family and a town apart. Stephen Lang does a fine job with all the characters, though the wolf howls are left to the imagination.
By Nicholas Evans BDD Audio, $25.95 ISBN 055347880X 5+ hours
Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.
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The brothers in Wally Lamb's latest bestseller, I Know This Much Is True, are twins, identical in appearance only. Dominick, angry, wanting revenge, survived his abusive step-father and somehow avoided the genetic quirk that caused his twin, Thomas, to become a paranoid schizophrenic. Now, at 40, Dominick must take charge of his psychotic sibling. Always torn between love and resentment for his brother, Dominick is forced to examine his past and his present, the demons that beset his family, his own devastations. The result is a narrative absorbing in its sadness, buoying in its triumphs. Wally Lamb, whose first novel She's Come Undone won wide praise, has gone one better here, and Ken Howard's finely modulated reading deepens its intensity.
The brothers in Allan Folsom's new thriller-diller are a whole new ball game. And the games being played in Day of Confession are deadly indeed. Harry Addison, a hot-shot Hollywood entertainment lawyer and his brother Danny, now a priest working in the Vatican, have been estranged for many years. Suddenly, there's flurry of communication -- all bad. First, there's a message from Danny, scared, uncertain, unlike him, then there's a call saying that Danny has been killed in a bus explosion. When Harry reaches Rome, he discovers that the body he's supposed to bring home is not his brother's and that Danny is the suspected murderer of the Cardinal Vicar of Rome. Ignoring the not-too-subtle advice to get out while the getting is good, Harry decides to find his brother and instead finds a Byzantine plot to take over the world. Joe Mantegna, a favorite audio performer, strays from his usual reading style to include a range of accents for individual characters, and it works effectively for him and his audience.
The brother angle doesn't become obvious until late in Barbara Vine's masterful mystery, The Chimney Sweeper's Boy, masterfully read here by Michael Williams. As her loyal fans know, when Ruth Rendell writes as Barbara Vine you don't get cloak and dagger, rather you get finely crafted, slowly revealed observations on the human condition gone to extremes. When well-known writer Gerald Candless dies, one of his grief-stricken daughters is asked to write a memoir about her beloved father. As she begins to collect background information, she finds that he was not the man he claimed to be, and she uncovers a past that no one suspected.
Ten-year-old Susan Kendall was kidnapped and murdered, her body found on Christmas day. Rouge, her twin brother and best friend, never quite recovered. Now, 15 years later, Rouge, a Princeton drop-out, turned hometown cop, has to confront the past all over again. Two ten-year-old girls have disappeared, it's almost Christmas, and the outcome is all too predictable. But Carol O'Connell's mystery novels and her oddly brilliant crime solvers are not at all predictable, as Judas Child, performed by Erika Leigh, well demonstrates. A departure from her stylish Mallory series, this one ensnares you in a web of suspense. O'Connell's characters stay with you, as does her questioning of how a child might survive horror, how the mind copes with the unbearable.