BAY OF SOULS

College professor, father, and middling husband, Michael Ahearn successfully holds himself at a safe distance from emotion. In his search for that elusive something to give his life meaning, he leaves the dreary comforts of home and family for the Caribbean and an exotic woman, where he finds himself in the midst of a fever-dream filled with political, spiritual, and emotional chaos, and an earthy, brooding eroticism. As Michael struggles with his obsession, narrator Arliss Howard captures his moral and emotional dilemma, creating an intensity bordering on delirium. He is less successful at capturing believable French or Caribbean accents, how-ever, stretching credibility in dialogue exchanges. Even so, Stone's beautifully crafted look into an ordinary man's soul pits the intellectual against the spiritual against the erotic, and the listener wins. S.J.H. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: AUG/SEP 03]