The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt #1), by John Bellairs (author), George Guidall (narrator)

Recorded Books, February 2018 (original publication June 1973)

In 1948, Lewis Barnavelt is orphaned at the age of ten when his parents are killed in a car crash. His Uncle Jonathan becomes his  guardian, and Lewis takes a long bus ride to a small town in New York, where Uncle Jonathan collects him and takes him to his home at the top of the very well-named High Street.

But Jonathan Barnavelt is not your average bachelor uncle who has suddenly inherited his brother's son. He and his neighbor & good friend, Mrs. Zimmerman, are witches. Jonathan's house previously owned by Isaac Izard and his wife, Serenna, who were also witches--but not good witches. They're dead, but not entirely gone. There's a clock, with a sinister purpose, somewhere in the walls of the house.

Down Among the Sticks & Bones (Wayward Children #2), by Seanan McGuire (author, narrator)

Macmillan Audio, June 2017

In Every Heart a Doorway, we encountered Eleanor West's Home for Wayward Children, and the young people there who had stumbled through doors that shouldn't have existed, into worlds where utterly different rules apply. This novella is the story of the experiences of Jack and Jill, a.k.a. Jacqueline and Jillian.

They're identical twins, born to a couple who wanted children mainly for reasons of social standing. When they learned the pregnancy was twins, deeply, desperately hoped that the babies would be a girl and a boy, completing their perfect nuclear family in one shot.

But it's two girls. Jacqueline becomes her mother's designated Perfect Lady of a daughter, dressed in frilly dresses, and taught to be obsessively clean, and to never do anything adventurous at all. Jillian becomes the almost-son for her father, short hair, sports, getting dirty all the time.

Fatal Fall (A Shandra Higheagle Mystery #8), by Paty Jager (author), Ann M. Thompson (narrator)

Windtree Press, January 2019

This is number eight in a series, so there is backstory for these characters that I don't know except for what I picked up in the story. This didn't create any problem in following this story; it just hints a more behind these characters than what's on the page here.

Shandra Higheagle is Native American, and sometimes has dreams that feature her grandmother sharing, in somewhat opaque fashion, information she may need. She's also a potter, with a growing reputation, and a craft show she's supposed to be selling her pottery at in a couple of weeks. It's really not convenient that she's sick, which is why she's at Dr. Porter's office, and finds out that he's had to rush home because something happened to his aunt. Shandra, incurably curious about people and odd events, decides to swing by there--especially once she realizes her boyfriend, Detective Ryan Greer, is also headed there.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World's Most Diabolical Virus, by Bill Wasik (author), Monica Murphy (author), Johnny Heller (narrator)

Blackstone Audio, July 2012

This is a cultural history of rabies. Bill Wasik is a journalist, and Monica Murphy a veterinarian, and they've put together an amazing, and amazingly readable, account of the history, mythology, and science of rabies, the only disease we know that has a nearly 100% fatality rate.

Rabies kills, and while it's doing that, it drives is victims mad, with interludes of lucidity when they know what's happening to them. It also, though most of history, mostly reached us through the most familiar of our domestic animals, our dogs.

This is perhaps why rabies seems so tied to our myths of vampires and zombies.

Falling for the Marshal (Marrying a Marshal #4), by Natalie Dean

Kenzo Publishing, January 2019

Samantha VanHellen is living a privileged but very boring life in Boston. She wants marriage and children, but Charles, the man she once thought she'd be marrying, keeps behaving like he's courting her, and never quite proposing. She's closing in on old maid territory, Charles is also paying court to a much younger woman, and Samantha is tired of being treated as a brainless appendage by both Charles and her father. When she sees an ad for a mail order bride from Beau Tibbets, a man in Cypress Springs, Texas, she decides to respond.

Tom Wilson is a deputy federal marshal in Dry Gulch, Texas, but he's been sent to Cypress Springs to fill in for a marshal who is off visiting his wife's family. Tom is happy to get away from Dry Gulch for a month, because he's feeling increasingly harassed by a widow in town who is a very nice lady, but who is determined that he is going to be her second husband.

Molecules of Emotion: Why You Feel the Way You Feel, by Candace B. Pert (author, narrator)

Simon & Schuster Audio, ISBN 9780743541398, September 1997

Candace Pert, a neuroscientist and discoveror of the opiate receptor, recounts both the intricate relationship between mind, body, and emotions, and her own career uncovering those connections and the neurochemical basis of them. Beginning her career in the early 1970s, gender was an even bigger obstacle than it is now, which no cultural or legal expectation that it shouldn't be. Sometimes she had to fight for recognition of her contributions; other times she had to fight to be able to do the work at all.

But along the way, she made major discoveries, and had life-changing experiences. The mind-body dichotomy was still unquestioned scientific orthodoxy in her early days. She doesn't say, but I will: Rene Descartes has a lot to answer for. Pert's work with neuropeptides and their receptors helps to rebuild the essential unity of the person, mind, body, and emotions, and uncover the connections between our emotional health and our physical health.

Cyteen (Cyteen 1-3) (Alliance-Union), by C.J. Cherryh (author), Gabra Zackman (narrator), Jonathan Davis (narrator)

Audible Frontiers, March 2012 (original publication 1988)

I will confess it up front. I love this book.

Yes, it's long. It was originally published in three volumes in paperback, in the late 1980s. That made sense from a physical size point of view; it doesn't make sense in terms of the story. This is, like The Lord of the Rings, a long, single novel.

It is, as another review commented, a murder mystery in which the mystery is never solved, and features a conspiracy which is partially but never completely explained. We don't get all the answers.

That's part of what makes it the fascinating, complex book that it is.

Her Second Chance Cowboy (Brothers of Miller Ranch #1), by Natalie Dean

Kenzo Publishing, December 2018

Ten years ago, Chastity Parker, tired of the pressure to just marry and have babies from her parents, and assumptions about her because she was half Native from others, left her small Montana town for New York City to pursue her acting dreams. Her visits home got painful enough that finally she stopped going home.

Now her father has died, and she's back, to help her mother cope with the funeral and get settled into the new phase of her life.

Unfortunately, her parents' financial situation is worse than she realized--and there's something wrong with her mother, too. Sometimes she's clear, focused, and lucid--and sometimes she calls Chastity by the names of long-dead relatives, and wonders when her husband will be home.

Also, one of the first people Chastity meets at the wake is Ben Miller, her old boyfriend, who broke his promise to come with her, and in the process broke her heart.

But from his viewpoint, she's the one who broke his heart. The only girl he ever loved left town for no reason he can understand.

In Dog We Trust

Berkley, ISBN 9780399584251, January 2019

No dogs die in the telling of this story.

Jocelyn Hillier and her mother live in an expensive, beachside summer vacation town in Delaware. They're not rich, though. They're locals, and run a laundry service for summer visitors.

And one day, Jocelyn is out for a run, and winds up saving a Labrador from getting hit by a car and killed. In the process, she meets both Peter Allardyce, owner of Carmen whom she has just rescued, and three other very expensive Labs, all of whom have prestigious pedigrees, and Christopher Cantor the Third, a young man both handsome and rich, as well as very charming.

Despite her mother's warnings against having anything to do with summer people, or rich people generally, Jocelyn is soon exercising Allardyce's dogs, and dating Chris.

Chris isn't the prize he seems, but on the other hand, elderly, misanthropic, and tightfisted, turns out to have a higher opinion of her than she had any basis for suspecting. She finds out when he dies suddenly.

True Places, by Sonja Yoerg

Lake Union Publishing, ISBN 9781503904781, January 2019

Suzanne Blakemore lives an organized, busy life, with a devoted, successful husband, and two bright teenagers, a son and a daughter. She also has a round of volunteer activities that keep her far too busy to think about anything that may be lacking in her life, and only rarely leaves her alone long enough for a panic attack.

Then one day, feeling the demands of her life closing in, she drives off down a largely deserted highway, exactly the sort of thing she should avoid, and sees a young girl crouched by the side of the road. Suzanne stops, and speaks to her--and then coaxes the seriously ailing, underweight Iris into her car and takes her to the hospital.

Pretty much no one is happy with her about this, especially when she does not immediately lose interest in Iris after dropping her at the hospital. Her daughter, Brinn, thinks Iris is an excuse to ignore her. Son Reid also thinks Iris is a Project taken on to avoid other things, though he has a slightly better sense that it may be herself Suzanne is trying to ignore. Suzanne's mother Tinsley is appalled she's involving herself with a homeless person who can only reflect badly on their social standing. Husband Whit is at least somewhat concerned about what Suzanne wants, but really agrees with everyone else that it would be better to take no further interest. Besides, he's pursuing a big business deal...