The Secret Place, by Tana French, read by Stephen Hogan and Lara Hutchinson, 20:34, Penguin Audio, $50
The narration of “The Secret Place,” a police procedural about a boy’s murder on the grounds of a privileged girls school in suburban Dublin, proves a near-perfect vehicle for Tana French’s newest entry in her Dublin Murder Squad series. Stephen Hogan, who voiced French’s 2012 “Broken Harbor,” creates a likable Detective Stephen Moran, an ambitious officer hoping to use this case to vault him into the murder squad from his normal assignment in cold cases. Hogan does a similarly convincing job unspooling the prickly personality of Moran’s partner, Detective Antoinette Conway — the murder squad pariah who caries a justifiable chip on her shoulder. Lara Hutchinson, a stage actress who has voiced several audiobooks, narrates the chapters in which the girls’ story unfolds in tandem with the investigation. Her light voice, a complete contrast to Hogan’s, eases the transition between puzzled detectives and scheming teenagers.
French’s mysteries can whip a chill wind right through you, not by dabbling in freak evil, but by unveiling the familiar characters wrapped in the deceptions her detectives uncover. This book doesn’t quite meet that standard. Reaching for the sheer nastiness girls at this age are capable of, the author at times goes a little too “Mean Girls” to be believable. A short detour into the supernatural is also a departure for an author of such earthbound themes. But the story still holds its own. It’s not quite “Broken Harbor,” her best book by my reckoning, but it’s still 20 hours of engrossing listening.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, by David Shafer, read by Bernard Setaro Clark, 15:11, Hachette Audio, $25.98
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A clever book with an entertaining narrator just exploding with personalities, “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot” is the story of how three people in their 30s, Leila, Leo and Mark, come together to upend a madman’s plot to breach privacy worldwide and use algorithmic ingenuity to hold everyone hostage to their data. But no summary can do justice to the snap and smarts of this witty tale. When the story starts, Leila is trying to help a disorganized NGO launch in Myanmar, “Was it called Burma. … Or Myanmar, which sounded like a name cats would give their country?” she muses. In Myanmar, Leila sees something she shouldn’t, and bad guys go after her family. Leo is about to be fired from his job at a day care center that “resembles a start-up run by toddlers.” Before he lands in rehab, he publishes his paranoid ravings about what’s happening to privacy — and some of it turns out to be true.
The good guys who recruit Leila and Leo have code names such as “Seymour Butz.” They house their recruits in closed Ikea stores. Mark, the author of a wildly successful and completely empty self-help book, is under pressure to work for the bad guys. He gradually realizes he will succumb to this co-option “unless he personally (has) to drown puppies.” Narrator Bernard Setaro Clark makes things easy for the listener by creating an orchestra of distinct voices for the many characters in the mix — an ingenious complement to this wild ride.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami, read by Bruce Locke, 10:09, Random House, $20-$40
The often strange worlds created by Haruki Murakami are at their most pedestrian in “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.” Gone is Murakami’s deft, albeit sometimes bewildering magical realism, replaced with a slog of a tale balanced on the moment in college when Tsukuru’s best friends from high school cut him off without explanation. Each of these friends has a color in his or her name, while Tsukuru’s name means “to build,” simultaneously enforcing his pallid status and predicting his future as an engineer of railroad stations. The loss of his friends triggers a life-changing breakdown, and although Tsukuru recovers, he feels more colorless than ever. Tsukuru makes only one friend as a young man, and that friend, too, disappears without explanation.
Finally, a girlfriend urges Tsukuru to confront his past, which sends him looking for his high school buddies to learn the not-very-interesting reason behind his betrayal. Much about this book is disappointing; sentences and descriptions feel tossed off thoughtlessly. Characters show emotion by narrowing their eyes. For all occasions. Often. Narrator Bruce Locke, who appeared in “Robocop 3” and in several television series, seems determined to match the colorless theme, beginning nearly every sentence on a high note and slowly sinking down the scale. His dialogue is better, often lively, but he makes little distinction between male and female speakers, which can be confusing.
Jenni Laidman is a frequent Printers Row Journal contributor.