O Jerusalem, by Laurie R. King

This book was 14 hours and 9 minutes long, which includes a long author interview, and was read by Jenny Sterlin. It is also the most recent in a series of novels that began with "The Beekeeper's Apprentice".

If you liked Sherlock Holmes, you will be glad to know that his career is not over. Laurie King has written a new series in which the great detective is much older, but who now has a young female partner who "does all the dirty work". And I am not talking about cooking and cleaning.

Mary Russell is a bookish young woman of nineteen who is also nimble, stealthy, and throws a mean knife. This would be enough to distinguish her in our present century, but Mary is working in post-WW1 Palestine. Holmes has been pulled out of mothballs to investigate a plot to kill a lot of dignitaries. This is part of a larger plot to destabilize the new Jewish settlements after the Balfour Declaration.

This book was written as an old Victorian era spy novel. There is little attention to Miss Russell's sexuality in her male-dominated world, although it would be unrealistic for her NOT to use her feminine allure if it comes in handy. And it does, but it merely annoys her to do so.

There is some blood, no sex, no swearing (that I can recall), and lots of words to stretch a lazy vocabulary. I understand these books are a favorite among a subset of teenage girls, and I can understand why. Mary is a young woman who demands to be taken seriously without being bitchy about it. She is a hard-working asset to the Old Master, and this was a pretty good book. I give it 3 stars.

Pegasus Descending, by James Lee Burke

I got this book from the library on compact disc, so I cannot tell you offhand how may hours long it was. It came on 11 discs and was read by Will Patton.

I know we just did a JLB novel recently, but people line up to get them at the library, so I have to be opportunistic. This one was released just last year, and it is yet another Dave Robicheaux novel. Dave is an on again off again Iberia County Sheriff's Detective, as well as an on again off again dry alcoholic. He is on his third or fourth wife, Molly, an ex-nun with leftist political tendencies.

Dave is once again doing battle with the dirtbags of privilege as he is investigating the death of a homeless man, the apparent suicide of a young girl, and a group of grifters who are trying to take down a local gangster as an act of revenge for a murder committed long ago. Yes, resurfacing evil from a bygone era is a recurring theme in these books. And since this is Louisiana we're talking about, the swamps are full of hastily sunken evil.

As usual, there is the poetic descriptions of the creepy southern crime scenes and romantic poverty, juxtaposed with trash-talking bad guys and cops with flexible consciences. Burke writes about promiscuous and vulgar people as well as anyone. He is a good story teller. But what is troubling is that I have started to do the math on Dave Robicheaux. If Dave was 20 years old in 1958, he is now 69, getting into brutal bar fights, taking beatings, and does not need to take a pill 30 minutes before intercourse. Dave is a baby-boomer fantasy. It's time that he retires, and puts down his three-legged pet raccoon, Tripod. Maybe in some future Dave Robicheaux novel, Dave will be solving cases in his nursing home, but I doubt it.

This was a 3 star book, but the series is beginning to stretch credulity.

Panic, by Jeff Abbot

This book was 11:38 long and was published in 2005. The narrator was L. J. Ganser.

I have never heard of this author before, but he's has 6 or 7 previous novels in print, plus a newer one last year.

This story is about a young man who goes back home to discover his mother has been killed and his father is missing, and that they had secret lives that have just come apart.

Evan Casher is a 24 year-old documentary filmmaker with an impressive career, a new girlfriend, and a family that was not all it appeared to be. And not even the girlfriend is what he thought she was. And now he is a pawn in a murderous game between clandestine organizations that blame each other for the Hell that has broken loose upon his family. Each asks him to trust them to save him from the other, and both want whatever his mother was killed for.

This is a well-written story about an rather ordinary man discovering that he has been lied to all his life. Then he has to figure out which group of strangers to trust, and decides that he cannot trust either.

I liked this story because the main character had no wealth to bail him out, like so many others do in other books. He has to be resourceful, clever, and as ruthless as a man with nothing left to lose. The story's resolution was diabolically interesting and one I've never heard before. This was a 4 star book. I will look for more by this author.

Crusaders Cross, by James Lee Burke

This book was 10 hours and 43 minutes long, was read by Will Patton, and is the fourteenth novel based on Louisiana cop/ex-cop Dave Robicheaux.

James Lee Burke is one of my guilty pleasures. His books are not for people with delicate sensibilities. They are bloody and profane and take place in a place that was, in my opinion, the bleeding sore of Western Civilization before Hurricane Katrina attempted to flush it away. It is a credit to Burke's power as a writer that he is able to romanticize the world of alcoholic lawman Dave Robicheaux in such a way that transforms him into some kind of Southern warrior-poet who battles the living gargoyles of a Gothic-Noir netherworld.

Burke's novels are not content to live in the present, and this one is no different. It begins as a trip down a trash-strewn memory lane to a time when Dave and his half-brother, Jimmie, lose track of time on a sandbar, and are stranded there when the tide comes in and they are surrounded by sharks as the water gets deeper. A girl in a boat comes out and rescues them, and Jimmie falls for the girl, unaware that she has a pimp and has no life of her own.

Jimmie tries to help her get out of "the life" and falls just minutes short of rescuing her before her pimp leaves town with her with vengeance on his mind. That was in 1958, and Jimmie has spent the rest of his life keeping hope alive that she was not killed for her attempt to escape the business.

Many years later, the girl in the boat resurfaces as part of a tangled mess that is getting cleaned up the old-fashioned way: killing off the participants. Dave has recently been restored to his position on the Iberia County Sheriff's Detective squad to help find a serial killer among the low-lifes he knows so well.

The writing is much better than the plot in this one. And that happens a lot when you've milked a character dry. And there are still 3 Dave Robicheaux novels after this one. It's worth 3 stars, especially if you've never read Burke before.

Cod: A biography of the Fish that Changed the World, by Mark Kurlansky

This book was 7 hours and 37 minutes long and was read by Richard M. Davidson.

If you know me well, you know that I eat stuff like this up. Odd slants on history are a favorite of mine, although after reading this, our political histories will seem like a footnote to the desperate search for sustainable food supplies.

For many years the humble cod fish was a staple of life for coastal people. The first explorers, in fact, went looking for better fishing instead of land and titles. When John Cabot came upon the coast of Newfoundland and claimed it for England, it was already frequented by the Basques in large numbers. They had simply kept their mouths shut about it, preferring to keep the fish for themselves.

That is the kind of odd history that lies beneath the more famous stories. Cod were able to be dried and carried for a long time, making not only the long voyages of the explorers possible, but the West Indian slave trade as well. And cod have continued to be a bone of contention between cod-rich Iceland and its European neighbors, as late as the 1970s.

This was fascinating, and a wonderful read. I'd give it 4 stars if it didn't get bogged down in so darned many recipes for cod. It got to be a drag after awhile. It slips to 3 stars just for that alone.

Deal on Ice, by Les Standiford

This book was published in 1998, was 9 hours and 57 minutes long, and was narrated by Ron McLarty.

Miami Building contractor John Deal gets caught up in a televangelists plot to take over a media outlet when his friend, who owns an eclectic bookstore, is killed by hired assassins.

This is even dumber than it sounds. Since this is one of a series of John Deal mysteries, I am now relieved of tracking this author and his work. One star.

Memoirs of Willliam T. Sherman

This was 4 hours and 24 minutes long, and was narrated by Nelson Runger.

You must think I am on a Civil War bender right about now. That is not the case. I have simply been latching onto interesting looking titles. But I will admit having a weakness for Civil War history.

This is a terrific read. General Sherman was not just a highly successful warrior in the field, but an excellent writer, able to articulate his views impressively. He includes some of the earliest "flame wars" on record: his literary sparring with General Hood of the Confederate Army.

This book follows Sherman's experience in the War from early 1864 until he completed his famous March to the Sea that ended in Savannah, Georgia. Details of his policies and decisions would have made a good alternative to our current war policy in Iraq. Although I hate to bring our present difficulties into an audiobook review, it is hard no to think about it while listening to the General describe his decision to evacuate Atlanta instead of trying to police it while prosecuting a war.

This is a 4 star book!

The Amalgamation Polka, by Stephen Wright

This book came from NetLibrary, was 11 hours and 46 minutes long, and was narrated by Michael Emerson.

This book was much better than its title, which is a derivative of one of the derogatory names for Abolitionists of the mid-19th century: Amalgamators.

Set before and during the American Civil War, this is a coming of age tale of both Liberty Fish and his mother, Roxana Maury. She grew up on a plantation surrounded, and nourished by, the institution of slavery in all its brutality. He grew up in a fiercely abolitionist family in Upstate New York.

Roxana meets Thatcher Fish in Saratoga, New York, where the female Maury's have gone on holiday after a huge family blowout on the morality of their existence. She bolts from the family after a final argument with her mother the same way she came into the world, naked. Wrapped only in a bed sheet, she seeks out the young man she has just met at their hotel, who shares her political viewpoint.

Liberty Fish, their son, grows up as a kind of abolitionist Huck Finn. His family's home is a stop on the Underground Railroad, and his life is full of odd characters. When the Civil War begins, he enlists, and begins a journey to his mother's ancestral home in South Carolina, where he confronts his slaver grandfather, who has morphed grotesquely into the Joseph Mengele of the South; performing experiments on his black servants in efforts to make them white.

This novel was both funny and revolting, and never boring. The prose is delightful to listen to. It transports you to a time when people were more literate, long before we were only computer literate. This is a 4 star book.