Audiobooks roundup

“The Answers” by Catherine Lacey, narrated by Megan Tusing, Blackstone, 9:41

The best narrators disappear as you listen. The voice blends so smoothly with the story as the actor skillfully creates characters, manages emotions and paces drama that the listener no longer notices she is being read to. Megan Tusing accomplishes just this in Catherine Lacey’s second novel, “The Answers.” It’s is an unusual story that should strain credulity, but the fullness of Lacey’s main character and the grace of her writing makes the truly bizarre feel normal. The narrator is every bit as convincing.

The story revolves around Mary Parsons, who is desperate to find money to complete a New Age-y medical treatment, the only relief she’s found from constant, excruciating pain: “I was pregnant with it, labor that never ended, just ebbed.” To make money, she signs up to play the “emotional girlfriend” to narcissistic actor Kurt Sky. She’s among a harem of women he recruits to embody the various possibilities in a relationship: emotional girlfriend, angry girlfriend, intellectual girlfriend and maternal girlfriend. Somehow, Lacey makes this all feel utterly plausible. As the emotional girlfriend, Mary pretends the role of close and empathic listener while Kurt maunders on about every stray thought, never once showing a hint of curiosity about her. No surprise when he seems to fall in love with this mirror.

“Prussian Blue” by Philip Kerr, narrated by John Lee, Penguin, 17:52

If you haven’t heard a John Lee narration, you probably don’t listen to many audiobooks. He’s nearly inescapable, with more than 400 titles to his name. But on “Prussian Blue,” the 12th entry in the noir stories of German detective Bernie Gunther, Lee seems somehow disengaged. Some character voices are odd and distracting. And while hiding emotion may be essential for a hard-boiled detective, wouldn’t even Gunther produce a little feeling when relating his own hanging? (This isn’t the plot spoiler it seems.)

In previous Gunther sagas, Lee’s detective was more consistently expressive, if always low-key. Dialog in the book’s denouement grows muddy with voices that are often indistinguishable. I had to listen twice. Yet the two tidily woven tales in “Prussian Blue” are still worth the less-than-optimal narration. In one story it’s 1956, and Bernie is on the run from the East German Stasi. In the other it’s 1939, and the detective has been summoned to Hitler’s mountaintop retreat to solve a murder. Gunther must work fast. Hitler will arrive soon for his 50th birthday, and the Nazis want all the loose ends shot and buried before the leader makes an appearance. Bernie follows a virulent trail, all the while knowing he’s helpless against the corruption he finds gnawing its way through the Nazi regime.

“Refuge” by Dina Nayeri, narrated by Mozhan Marno and Youssif Kamal, Penguin, 10:29

Two narrators in one book should be a gift, but not all pairings work, especially when one narrator is much stronger than the other, as happens in Dina Nayeri’s thoughtful and challenging autobiographical novel, “Refuge.” Nayeri tells the story of Niloofar Hamidi, who, like the author, fled Iran with her mother and brother when she was 8. Like the author, Niloo sees her father, who stays behind, only four times after she leaves Iran. Although Niloo seems Western to many, she cannot put away her identity as a refugee. Nor can she quite make peace with her larger-than-life father, Bahman Hamidi, a dentist and an opium addict who bursts with life — with tragedy and comedy, kindness and brutality.

Yet Youssif Kamal, who reads the chapters written from the father’s point of view, is miscast as this lively, exasperating figure. His stiff reading of Baba, the Farsi word for father, pales beside Mozhan Marno’s animated version of Bahman. Marno reads the chapters devoted Niloo, and voices Baba when father and daughter speak. Marno has some 45 narrations to her credit, while Kamal has narrated only a handful. You may know Marno as reporter Ayla Sayyad on “House of Cards” or as agent Samar Navabi on “The Blacklist.”