September Audiobooks

I can't believe that it's the end of the month already! Time is flying by and I haven't started making Christmas postcards yet.
I'm not sure how I got through 12 books this month. In the evenings I've been taking a free online lecture class and watching my DrBeen medical videos almost every night. Clearly the rest of the time I don't talk to anyone, including my husband. I do admit that I have headphones on all day long. 
​My reading for September was a real mix of things and, frankly, not the best moth of reading ever. I think my favorites were Liar's Girl, Wives and Daughters and Thunderstruck. Lethal Agent was good, it was Mitch Rapp so it had to be good, but the subject matter was a little too current.

​Whatg was your favorite book of the last month?

The Darwin Affair
By Tim Mason, Read By Derek Perkins

This is a Victorian mystery that made me think it could be Charles Dickens writing about Jack The Ripper. It starts with an attempt on Queen Victoria's life that ends with the death of a petty thief. But that's just the beginning of the torturous murders in this book. Along the way you meet Charles Darwin, Karl Marx and other notables of the time. It was OK but it's quite gruesome and I found it hard to keep up with all the characters and story lines.

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Force of Nature
By Jane Harper, Read By Stephen Shanahan

This is #2 in the Federal Police Agent Aaron Falk series. I read the first book in this series, The Dry, last month and really enjoyed it. This one was a bit of a letdown.

The basic storyline is good. Five female colleagues go on a corporate outback hiking/camping retreat. There's also a group of male colleagues on a separate hike in the same area. One of the women dies on the trip and everyone has a different story about the trip. 

In the last book Falk was the central character because the crime was in his own family. In this one the detective really could have been anyone. I don't feel his particular character added to the story. There really isn't much detecting because the story unfolds in a series of flashbacks. The hard part of the book was developing any sort of empathy with any of the characters. Two are sisters and one is the sister of the man who runs the company and none of them belong on a multi day hiking and camping trip. 

​I did eventually get into it and finish it but it was a bit of work for a while.

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Heroes
By Stephen Fry, Read By Stephen Fry

This is the second in Fry's series on the Greek myths and we chose this for the book to listen to on our vacation drive. The first book was about the Olympian gods. This one tells the stories of the mortal heroes like Perseus, Jason, Atalanta, Theseus and Heracles.

Stephen Fry does the BEST job of telling these stories! If you like the myths you will love his series. We listened to this for part of our car trip from Maine.

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A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
By Mark Twain, Read By Nick Offerman

I don't need to review this book. It's Mark Twain and it's free on Audible! Honestly, I'm not a huge Twain fan but Offerman does a great narration.

​This was our other driving book over vacation.

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American Operator
By Brian Andrews and Jeffrey Wilson, Read By Ray Porter

This is #4 in the Tier One series. Ember is America's premier Black Ops unit and this time they are trying to find Amanda Allen. She was the aid to the Ambassador to Turkey. The Ambassador was assassinated and Allen was kidnapped. She also happens to be a CIA operative. Ember is sent to Syria to try to find her.

These are books are tough men and tough women, lots of fighting and big egos. They are a little formulaic but they are fast paced, easy to follow and American usually wins.

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The Liar's Girl
By Catherine Ryan Howard, Read by multiple artists

About a month ago Audible introduced a pretty large free library to subscribers. Free was kind of a cool concept so I decided to check it out. I expected it to be a bunch of mediocre or really old books. Instead I was pleasantly surprised by the size of the library and the number of seemingly good books available. This is the first one that I tried and I was not disappointed.

It's set in Dublin and a college student is found dead in the Dublin canal and then there's a second one. The police want the help of Allison Smith to talk to her ex-boyfriend to ask him to help solve the crimes. Allison has been living outside Ireland ever since her boyfriend, Will, was convicted of 5 similar murders while they were in college 10 years ago. Clearly he didn't kill the new girls so did he really kill the first 5?

I found Allison to be a bit too spineless as a character but I did like the book. I finished this one in 2 days because I couldn't put it down.

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Wives and Daughters
By Elizabeth Gaskell, Read By Prunella Scales

This is another gem that I found in the free Audible library. I had never heard of Gaskell but she was a popular Victorian writer and her book reminded me very much of Jane Austen. It's not quite as funny as Austen but it's a similar theme.

Molly Gibson is the only daughter of the local doctor and her mother died when Molly was very young. Molly is well loved by the townspeople. Her father decides that Molly needs a mother so me marries a local widow who turns out to be completely self-absorbed and petty. Fortunately Molly does love her new step-sister. It's a good look at what it was like to live and love in Victorian society.

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Thunderstruck
By Erik larson, Read By Bob Balaban

I really enjoy Erik Larson books. He has a knack for making historical events read like novels. In this one he tells of the invention of the wireless radio by Guglielmo Marconi and the story of Hawley Crippin, a mild mannered doctor who was convicted of murdering his wife. 

​The two stories overlap when Marconi's device is used for the first time to help solve the Crippin murder. 

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The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
By Kim Michele Richardson, Read By Katie Schorr

You might remember that in June I read The Giver of Stars by Jojo Moyes. It was about the fascinating story of the depression era packhorse libraries of Appalachia. It was very prolific especially in Kentucky and was a much needed connection to the outside world for the people of the region.

This is another book about a packhorse librarian (except that she uses a mule).  Cussy Mary Carter is the daughter of a coal miner and they live a hard hand-to-mouth existence. Cussy's life is complicated by the fact that she's a "blue". Her skin is blue and she is the last known blue. Cussie is based on the real blue people of the Appalachia. Most were members of the Fugate family and had a unique genetic trait (shared by some groups in Alaska). It's called Methemoglobinemia and you can read about it here and see photos on the Fugate family.

It's a good book about hardscrabble living and the hopes and dreams of a young, blue girl who is blamed for much of the bad around the area. It wasn't as good as Giver of Stars but I still enjoyed it.

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The Fall of Carthage
By Adrian Goldsworthy, Read By Derek Perkins

I love history and I should love this book. The Punic Wars led to the rise of Rome so it's an important series of events but there's way too much battle detail (battle-massacre-enslavement, rinse and repeat) to hold my interest. I may come back to it in bits to finish it off.

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Waking Nightmare
By Kylie Brant, Read By Bronson Pinchot

Before I talk about the book I want to talk about the narration first. I generally love Pinchot as a narrator but he really ruined the voice of Abbie, one of the 2 main characters. She's supposed to be tough, brilliant and unapproachable. Instead she comes off as slow, soft spoken and demure. But, in the end, it doesn't matter because this book is it's own nightmare.

It's really a romance novel disguised as a detective story. The characters are all stereotypes and not particularly well developed. The 2 main characters supposedly show up with deep personal demons that they have been dealing with for years. Poof! Exposed and resolved in 2 days of great sex! Long term relationship in 4 days? Sure! Let's get this case wrapped up. Oh look, no surprise, the culprit was right in from of us the whole time. 
Yes, I did listen to the whole thing because I figured out everything in the first hour and wanted to see if I was right. I did skip a lot to get to the end though.

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Lethal Agent
By Kyle Mills (for Vince Flynn), Read By George Guidall

This is the 18th book in the Mitch Rapp series and I needed reliable Mitch after the previous 2 dud books. I do love Kyle Mills writing Mitch now. The books are all full of intrigue and action.

Because it was Mitch Rapp I didn't even read the summary. Had I, I might have postponed this one for a while. Why? Because someone is producing a bat virus to unleash on the US! It's not the Chinese. In the series we are still focused on the Islamic terrorists and it is they who are producing the virus and hoping to transmit it with the help of Mexican drug smugglers.

It's a good book but you might not find this subject matter to be the escape from reality that you are looking for.

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