Two great audiobooks to listen to on your drive

Safe Houses After handing the job of reading his previous six audiobooks to six different people, Dan Fesperman has taken on “Safe Houses” himself, and turned out a truly outstanding performance. His voice has a background crackle — only to be expected in a former, hard-bitten international-affairs reporter (for the Baltimore Sun) — but it has a force and limberness that one does not normally find in authors reading their own work. Here he shepherds us back and forth from the double murder of a man and his wife on a Maryland chicken farm in 2014, to Berlin in 1979 where the motive is slowly uncovered. There we find the dead woman, Helen, at 23, aspiring to be CIA agent, but relegated to looking after the company’s safe houses in Berlin. When she becomes accidental witness to the brutal rape of a female asset by her handler, Kevin Gilley, she reports the incident to her superiors — but it is she who pays the price. With justice on her mind and the aid of a couple of like-minded women, Helen slips undercover to expose Gilley and finds herself hunted by trained killers. Meanwhile, in 2014, her daughter, Anna, is determined to get to the bottom of her mother’s killing — and finds herself marked for destruction. The novel is clever, character rich, and suspenseful, almost unbearably so toward the end when it wheels around to deliver a world-class stunner. (Dreamscape, Unabridged, 13-1/2hours)

The Secrets Between Us It has taken a dozen years, but Thrity Umrigar has finally provided a sequel to “The Space Between Us,” the hard-luck story of the domestic-servant Bhima and her granddaughter, Maya, who live together in the slums of present-day Mumbai. “The Secrets Between Us” brings solace for those who felt dismayed by its predecessor’s ending, but it also provides enough backstory to stand on its own. The story moves outward to take in Parvati, an ancient, destitute woman whose father sold her into prostitution in her youth. Afflicted with a hideous tumor on her neck, she has a nihilistic outlook and a caustic tongue, barely surviving selling near-rotten cauliflowers. She and Bhima forge a prickly, mutually advantageous relationship, while Maya blossoms in a return to university and her friendship with two well-off, forward-looking women. Events unfold amid the cruel dynamics of the New India as market forces relentlessly crush the country’s poor, gobbling up public spaces to create fortresses of privilege. Narrator Sneha Mathan has a low, pleasant voice and reads in calm, English-accented tones, giving a range of unobtrusive, Indian-inflected diction to the story’s many characters. The novel’s plot is wonderfully rich in details of material life, and, though filled with misfortune and cruelty, is, in the end, a heartwarming tale of friendship and courage, making it escape listening of a very high order. (Harper Audio, Unabridged, 12 hours)