SELECTED SHORTS: WHODUNIT?

Murder, kidnapping, theft, and all their subtle and savage consequences are the subjects of yet another stellar Symphony Space collection. As always, the pieces are read before a live audience, and one can hear the anticipatory glee in the voices of Fionnula Flanagan, John Shea, and Isaiah Sheffer in their performances of crime classics by C.S. Montanye, Dashiell Hammett, and Ed McBain. The mood shifts with René Auberjonois's deadpan reading of Shirley Jackson's eerie "The Summer People." Hattie Winston finds the sad destructiveness in the crime of apartheid in Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer's "Country Lovers." The last line of Louise Erdrich's contemporary gem, "Gleason," read by Robert Sean Leonard, may best sum up the collection. "He hadn't flinched." None of these elegant, penetrating short stories do. What fun. B.P. 2010 Audies Finalist © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: MAY 2009]