![]() CREOLE BELLE (Simon & Schuster Audio, $29.99) is set in the Louisiana bayou country and features Burke’s Cajun cop, Dave Robicheaux, a sensitive roughneck who can brawl with the best of them while brooding over the legacy of violence and racial hatred that still taints the soul of this region. ![]() James Lee Burke is another broad-shouldered writer who can keep your wheels turning. Jim Frangione, who narrates here, plays Joe as a proper hard-boiled hero - a shrewd operator with a big heart - but he also has a wonderful repertory of voices for all the gangsters, gamblers, loan sharks and prison guards. ![]() Something like LIVE BY NIGHT (Harper Audio/HarperCollins, $39.99), Dennis Lehane’s rip-roaring Prohibition-era crime novel about Joe Coughlin, a young punk from Boston’s South End who takes on Florida’s big crime families to set up a major bootlegging empire in Tampa. Something really gripping, with high-stakes crimes, much gunplay and lots of manly action on the part of corrupt cops and powerful mobsters. If any of you long-haul truckers should ask for recommendations, I would suggest something that will keep you up and wired. But once I discovered audiobooks, the dream was revived, prompting a new critical standard for a mystery: How well does it travel? Although the quality of these recordings was wildly uneven, I was instantly hooked: You could read while in motion! I had given up on that dream back in college after my comp lit professor got into an accident trying to read and drive at the same time. Tape being the quaint technology whereby books were recorded back then, when listening to a lengthy unabridged novel meant lugging around stacks of cassettes that tended to crack open and spill their guts when dropped. That was pretty much my attitude toward audio mysteries until someone made me a judge in an awards competition for mysteries on tape. Thanks, but if you don’t mind, I’ll just read the book.
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