|
Sounds of romance and adventure
REVIEWS BY SUKEY HOWARD
A Survivor's Tale of Love and Loss By Gordon Chaplin Audio Renaissance, $17.95 3 hours ISBN 1559275375
The four women in Patricia Gaffney's memorable, moving novel, The Saving Graces, will inevitably be compared to the "Ya-Yas," but the only thing they really share is that they're four, female, and true friends. Rudy, Emma, Lee, and Isabel have known each other for ten years. They meet for dinner every few weeks and talk openly about their lives, dreams, disappointments, and triumphs. They support each other with love and trust and the unique kinship that kind of support brings. The women speak in alternating voices, their interlocking stories like the different colored patches in a lovingly patterned handmade quilt -- and reader Judith Ivey gives each character a special tone and distinct cadence. This is unabashedly a woman's book, one that made me tear up and smile and be proud of the "Graces."
By Patricia Gaffney Random House, $24 5 hours ISBN 0375407146
High voltage thriller . . . I'm not sure how I missed Toyer, Gardner McKay's hypnotically gripping thriller, when it first came out. Well, better late than never, so if you share my endless curiosity about psychopaths and serial killers, take the time now and tune in to this unabridged presentation. Toyer, the eponymous anti-hero, is more oddball, more intriguing, more perverse than most of his beastly brethren. Toyer doesn't kill; rather, he turns his victims -- all young, smart, and pretty -- into senseless, sensationless shells who can do nothing more than breathe. Why? That he doesn't reveal, but he sure likes publicity, likes becoming a media magnate, a weirdo celebrity of sorts. Dr. Maude Garance, who cares for the women he has so monstrously maimed, doesn't like Toyer, would love to have the chance to kill him, and though she's gambling with her life, she's willing to play his game -- winner take all.
By Gardner McKay Brilliance, $39.95 13 hours ISBN 1567404243
"Who ever said small towns were uneventful?" asks Caroline, the heroine of Nora Roberts's new novel Carnal Innocence. The beautiful, young, world-famous violinist has come to her late grandmother's home in the tiny town of Innocence, Mississippi to find peace and quiet, but what she finds are some big problems. Two women have been murdered and mutilated, and just as Caroline is settling in she happens on the third body. And Tucker Longstreet, the handsome, roguishly flirtatious scion of the town's first family, who has taken an immediate shine to her, doesn't make her feel any more at ease. Anyone familiar with Nora Roberts's best-selling brand of romantic suspense will know that they're in for riveting plot twists, smoldering scenes, and enduring love found where it's not expected.
By Nora Roberts BDD, $25 6 hours ISBN 0553526375
Nora Kelly's father disappeared when she was 12, lost in the remote canyons of Southern Utah where he was searching for Quivira, the Anasazi Indians' fabled, fabulous city of gold. Now, 16 years later, an archaeologist working at the Institute in Santa Fe, Nora eerily finds a letter from her father detailing the whereabouts of this legendary treasure trove. Thunderhead, by Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, read by Dana Delaney, follows Nora as she counters envious colleagues, gets the backing of the Institute's chief, and pulls together a team of highly talented professionals to finish what her father had started long ago, to unearth the glories of a civilization lost for centuries in the stark, silent slickrock desert. Nora had anticipated some problems -- this was not an ordinary expedition -- but she hadn't counted on deceit, betrayal, and power struggles from within her own ranks, and murderous attack from without.
By Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child TimeWarner, $24.98 6 hours ISBN 1570426678
Sukey Howard reports on spoken word audio each month.
|
Support your 
Gordon Chaplin wrote Dark Wind: A Survivor's Tale of Love and Loss in order to understand that love and that loss. Chaplin and his partner Susan Atkinson had both survived broken marriages and the difficult adjustments of their adolescent daughters (two each). They brought passion to each other, to their new life together. In a celebration of sorts, they bought a 36-foot motor-sailor and sailed first to the Mosquito Coast, then Panama, then across the Pacific; it was daring, courageous, and a bit foolish. Then, anchored off idyllic Wotho atoll in the northwestern Marshalls, the luck they'd so trusted in ran out. Chaplin's anguish and raw emotion in describing the typhoon that engulfed them hasn't been tempered by the intervening years, but perhaps the portrait he paints of their life and his intense love for Susan has been -- there's a poignancy and clarity that comes with time and with unrelenting regret. Chaplin's account of this calamitous adventure will stay with you long after Paul Michael's excellent reading is over.
Keep the Kleenex close . . .
High romance . . .
High adventure . . .