by Barbara Nevins Taylor 

Let me help you out with a few solid recommendations for an audiobook for the last days of summer. 

Choosing an audiobook presents the same kind of challenge you find when you look for something good on Netflix. There’s a lot of good stuff. But the struggle to discover something you want almost defeats the effort. 

P.J. Ochlan, a narrator and a coach for other narrators, mentioned Daisy Jones and the Six at the Audiobook Publishers Conference. “It’s a lot of fun,” he said. And he was right. Ochlan is part of the cast that features Jennifer Beals, Benjamin Bratt, Judy Greer, Robinne Lee and Pablo Schreiber, as well as other actors. 

This romp through the seventies tells the stories of the characters who come together in a fabulously successful rock band. 

Taylor Jenkins Reid creates believable, talented and often troubled, drug-fueled characters who clash and love and make great rock-and-roll. I’ll be surprised if you don’t enjoy the trip you take with them.  All the narrators are terrific.

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We spent three days in Athens in June and I wanted a book that went along with the history and culture theme of our trip.                     

I happily downloaded The Marathon Conspiracy by Gary Corby. I didn’t realize that it’s part of a series, but that didn’t matter. This book is set in ancient Athens in 460 BC, 30 years after the battle at Marathon that routed the Persians and marked the end of the first Greco-Persian war. The story’s quirky charm makes you laugh, while you root for the hero-detective Nickolaos and his partner-fiancee Diotima. The two young detectives get hired by the leader of Athens, Pericles, to find out who murdered Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens. His skull, found at a girls school at the Temple of Artemis, gets the story rolling. 

There’s a lot of ancient Greece and its mores and enough tension to keep you listening and enjoying. Socrates plays a role here as Nickolaos’s younger brother, and the warrior-playwright Aeschylus comes along as the action heats up. Narrator Erik Davies is almost better than the story and made all the characters believable.

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Siracusa puts you in southern Sicily, on an island called Ortigia linked by a bridge to the city of Siracusa. 

It’s a beautiful place with a history as a crossroads of civilizations and cultures. But for two couples on vacation, with the child of one couple, it turns into a place that reveals their personal weaknesses and throws their lives into chaos.

This psychologically tinged Delia Ephron romp will give you a taste of a magical place on the Ionian Sea in southern Sicily without making you feel like you checked your brains for the summer.

Talia Balsam, Katie Finneran, John Slattery and Darren Goldstein give voices to the travelers who don’t always share the same vision of fun. I won’t give the plot away, but this comes pretty close to a vacation from hell. A lot happens including one very bad thing. The excellent narrators make it real and keep you listening.

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If you haven’t read or listened to the IQ series by Joe Ide, start now.

 IQ kicks-off an all-American crime mystery series that puts Isaiah Quintabe, an African-American teenager in Long Beach, California to work solving crimes.

This extremely smart kid finds himself on his own after his brother, who’d been raising him, is mysteriously killed. He begins to investigate small crimes for neighbors, who initially pay him with baked goods, sweaters and other humble offerings.

Nicknamed IQ, he graduates quickly to the scary, and often hilarious, investigation of a crime involving a hip-hop star. Narrator Sullivan Jones gives a pitch-perfect performance.

The first book, IQ and the two that follow, Righteous and Wrecked feature an entertaining cast of young characters who make you want Joe Ide to write more.