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From the serious to the satirical
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
By John Le Carre Simon & Schuster Audio, $25 6 hours ISBN 0671043900
Alex-less Can there be a Jonathan Kellerman mystery novel without Alex Delaware and his psychologist's smarts? Indeed there can, and Billy Straight proves it. The "Billy" of the title is a 12-year-old boy who's run away from his horrific home and is doing his best to survive alone in the Hollywood hills when he inadvertently witnesses a vicious murder. The victim, the glamorous ex-wife of a TV star, draws press, public, and of course police attention. Enter a new Kellerman sleuth, Petra Connor, an LAPD homicide detective with her own unhappy baggage, a good heart, and the right stuff to make her a good cop. Petra is appealing and worthy of encore appearances, but it's Billy who steals the show and makes this new novel so compelling. Dr. Delaware does turn up briefly and, fortunately, John Rubenstein, noted narrator of the Doctor's deeds, is on hand for the new crew too.
By Jonathan Kellerman Random House AudioBooks, $24 4 hours ISBN 0375402829
The root and route of all evil
By James Grippando HarperAudio, $18 3 hours ISBN 069452106X
The end of Elvis Sometimes the facts, presented without fanfare, salacious innuendo, or tabloid fervor, can be more startling, more surprising than anything else; certainly they can be sadder. Sad is the story of the last half of Elvis Presley's life as documented by Peter Guralnick, and it's the facts he has so scrupulously gathered, the penetrating documentary he's made with them that is most disturbing. Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley, read by J. Charles, makes evident all the pills, parties, drugs, the destructive behavior, the wowing, winning, and wounding of young women, and the fumbling espousal of spirituality. Elvis's sweet nature, good manners, and concern for those who worked with him runs in counterpoint to his spiraling loss of control and deepening depressive state. Guralnick never indulges in speculation or superficial pop-psych; the picture he paints is painfully accurate, riveting in its calm appraisal.
By Peter Guralnick Nova Audio Books, $24.95 6 hours ISBN 1567408087
Old lives seen anew
By Larry McMurtry Penguin Audiobooks, $19.95 3 hours ISBN 0140868577
Marcel Proust
Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.
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Single and Single, John Le Carre's singularly crafted new novel is doubly engaging on audio; Le Carre reads, and he is, to my ears, one of the very best. Villainy and virtue are murkier since the Berlin wall and Communism fell, and Le Carre's brilliantly conceived characters and situations reflect our ambiguous new world. The intrigue is not between sovereign nations; rather, here it's criminal elements from former Russian states and an established London finance house known to trade in the clean and the dirty with equal equanimity. I won't even try to tell the story -- its signature complexity is its own reward. Suffice it to say that it opens with a shocker set on a stony Turkish hillside, moves to London, Istanbul, the Caucasus, and introduces Nat Brock (a cool, clever, George Smiley-like customs agent) and Oliver Single (heir to the House of Single and all its misdeeds), among others whom I hope we'll meet again.
Found Money, James Grippando's latest gripper, is the kind of "cut to the chase" thriller that adjusts well to abridgment. The pounding "chase" is on from the moment Amy, a stressed, struggling, single mom in Boulder, Colorado, opens a plain package containing $200,000. Honest to a fault, Amy is determined to find out if the much-needed gift is untainted and truly meant for her. In another part of the state, Ryan Duffy's dying father reveals that there's a stash of somewhat tainted money in their attic. Ryan, expecting little, finds a substantial cache of cash and finds himself drawn into a perplexing past where nothing is as it seems and everything seems to lead to big trouble. Are Amy's and Ryan's windfalls intertwined? You bet, but getting there is more than half the fraught-filled fun. Mark Blum narrates this convincing cautionary tale.
Penguin Lives, an intriguing new series of brief biographies, pairs the "biographied" with an unlikely, but imaginatively appropriate, biographer. And luckily for listeners who welcome the somewhat serious, the entire series will be available in slightly abridged audio versions; the first two have just been released. Crazy Horse remains a mythic figure, whose motives, ideals, and ideas are buried in the culture that died with him. Yet Larry McMurtry, using his novelist's intuition, invention, and narrative skill, gets closer to the legendary Sioux warrior than most historians have. Edmund White's eloquent, elegant evocation of Marcel Proust takes a very literary look at the life of one of literature's greatests, but leaves us with a very personal portrait of the man, his friends, family, and the forces of the era he lived in and chronicled.