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From droll drivel to a bag of bones
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By Steve Martin Simon & Schuster Audio, $18 140 minutes ISBN 0671043242
Don't know how I missed Robert Parker's first Jesse Stone mystery novel. Though I've always had a smoldering thing for Spenser (fictional hunks are safe!), I should have tuned into the new guy on the Parker block -- he's cool, courageous, svelte, and savvy, with a sufficient number of flaws to make him appealing. Add to that his leading role as police chief in a niftily plotted, high-stakes crime caper that causes Trouble in Paradise, and you've got a winner. Jesse, a former L.A. cop, has moved to the small, sedate seaside town of Paradise, Massachusetts, but a very bad guy with big-time ideas for making big money is about to turn Paradise into hell. Jesse's love life, tottering between paradise and hell, doesn't make matters any better. In Richard Masur's able reading the guys, good and bad, and the gals of both varieties sound just right.
By Robert Parker BDD Audio, $25 6 hours ISBN 0553525255
The "Kinkster" returns That canny, crepuscular, cat-loving, crime-solving country singer is back on the scene, using his renowned Jewish radar and cowboy logic to probe the depths of a dire, death-dealing plot to blow him away -- or are they really after Abbie Hoffman? Blast from the Past, a Kinky Friedman foray into life lived on the edge, is filled with his inimitable wisdom, phrased in the grandiloquent prose of those masters of the mystery genre who went before him (and who will probably come after him -- with a gun, that is). I won't even try to summarize the plot. Suffice it to say that this novel opens with a finely nuanced description of our hero playing chess with his cat on a cold Manhattan morning when a leggy, luscious blond honks her Porsche's horn to get this attention. When the real Kinkster reads, as he does here, it's always a blast.
By Kinky Friedman Soundelux, $17.95 3 hours ISBN 1559352825
Rules of the Wild, Francesca Marciano's literary debut, is a striking novel about looking for love and finding vulnerability, looking for escape from the past and finding that it is always there. Esme, the narrator and central character, leaves Italy after her eccentric poet father dies and goes to Kenya with a man she's not that fond of. She stays on, thinking that she might find new life and freedom in those heroically vast plains, but finds herself in a small, claustrophobic circle of expatriates who know each other all too well. She falls in love with Adam, a strong second-generation Kenyan who loves Africa, and then with Hunter, a journalist made haggard by its horrors. She realizes finally that the exterior landscape can't change her interior landscape, that to come of age is to come to terms with one's self.
By Francesca Marciano Random House AudioBooks, $18 3 hours ISBN 0375404392
Sidney Sheldon, that spinner of best-selling tales, has based his newest, Tell Me Your Dreams, on real events and a psychological disorder that has long been debated. Don't worry, I'm not giving too much away -- this is a complicated story where little is as it appears. In the beginning you have Ashley, a shy, talented computer graphics designer, living in Silicon Valley. But her quiet life ends when she feels she's being stalked by an unknown person for unknown reasons. Then it all gets worse -- a series of savage murders occurs, each with the same telltale method. At first, the police are totally baffled; then all the evidence points to an equally baffled Ashley. Suddenly, she's on trial, defended by a brave young lawyer fighting against enormous odds. But don't think you've got it all figured out until the very, very end. Morgan Fairchild gives a most convincing performance.
By Sidney Sheldon Audio Renaissance, $24.95 6 hours ISBN 1559275219
News Is a Verb: Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century, part of the Library of Contemporary Thought series, is a powerful audio essay by Pete Hamill, a newspaperman who is passionate about his craft and its affect on our lives. Hamill, not alone, sees the last ten months or so as a nadir in American journalism. He's deeply troubled that so many papers have abandoned their responsibilities, that so many are "getting dumber," lowering their standards to the sound bites of TV and the blather of talk radio. Newspaper journalism, he maintains, is not about entertainment. It's about bringing the truth to its readers, about separating fact from fiction, offering a solid corrective to the flaws of the quick fix and cynical, postmodern negation. Hamill believes that without this truth, wisdom and democracy are impossible. He reads with the same ardor, dedication, and wit with which he writes. Strong, provocative commentary on audio is most welcome -- not that droll drivel doesn't have its place, too.
Journalism at the End of the Twentieth Century By Pete Hamill Dove, $15 ISBN 0787117633
Audio Alert We told you that this was coming, and it's here -- every last word of Stephen King's brand-new blockbuster, Bag of Bones, 22 mesmerizing hours, read by the king of cold terror himself. Set in King country, rural western Maine, starring a King-like author with writer's block, it has all the paranormal requisites enmeshed in a moving, haunted love story.
By Stephen King Simon & Schuster Audio, $59.95 22 hours ISBN 0671582348
Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.
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The Nobel Prize this year will undoubtedly go to Steve Martin. The big question stumping the sage scholars who grant the award will be the category -- perhaps, categories -- in which to make him Laureate: literature, science, medicine, economics? For the few among us who have not read his perceptive, perspicacious commentaries on the weightiest issues of our time, the release of this audio, read as only a man who has worn a dress to get a laugh from a monkey can read, will be a sound way to expand enlightenment, education, and erudition. Steve Martin, usually thought of as merely an actor, comedian, screenwriter, and playwright, now ponders the imponderables: the benefits of memory lapses in the boomer generation, Schroedinger's Cat conundrum, the friendship of a noun with his fellow words. He muses on the essence of that sliver of time between pure nothing and pure something and comes up with Pure Drivel, 140 minutes of pure fun.
Meet a new good guy from Robert Parker
If you loved Out of Africa . . .
Sidney Sheldon in Silicon Valley?
Straight talk on the sad state of news