A Dirty Job

Protecting the souls of the dead from the forces of darkness is a nasty job, but someone has to do it. Fisher Stevens's narration of Moore's novel about a reluctant Grim Reaper will have listeners rolling with laughter. As the book opens, the neurotic Charlie Asher--thrift-shop owner and self-proclaimed "beta male"--is visiting his wife at the hospital, where she's just given birth to their daughter. But his world goes topsy-turvy when he finds his wife dead, with a mysterious old black man in a mint green suit standing over her. Stevens, the cynical, wisecracking Chuck Fishman in the CBS series "Early Edition," is an ideal choice as narrator. He imbues the story (without embalming it) with a whiny wit that fits Charlie's character, and he gives distinct personalities to a wide range of characters, human and otherwise. S.E.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

February 20, 2006
Cult-hero Moore (The Stupidest Angel
) tackles death—make that Death—in his latest wonderful, whacked-out yarn. For beta male Charlie Asher, proprietor of a shop in San Francisco, life and death meet in a maternity ward recovery room where his wife, Rachel, dies shortly after giving birth. Though security cameras catch nothing, Charlie swears he saw an impossibly tall black man in a mint green suit standing beside Rachel as she died. When objects in his store begin glowing, strangers drop dead before him and man-sized ravens start attacking him, Charlie figures something's up. Along comes Minty Fresh—the man in green—to enlighten him: turns out Charlie and Minty are Death Merchants, whose job (outlined in the Great Big Book of Death) is to gather up souls before the Forces of Darkness get to them. While Charlie's employees, Lily the Goth girl and Ray the ex-cop, mind the shop, and two enormous hellhounds babysit, Charlie attends to his dangerous soul-collecting duties, building toward a showdown with Death in a Gold Rush–era ship buried beneath San Francisco's financial district. If it sounds over the top, that's because it is—but Moore's enthusiasm and skill make it convincing, and his affection for the cast of weirdos gives the book an unexpected poignancy.

May 1, 2006
Moore spends a significant portion of his new novel speculating on the nature of the careful, cautious beta male, so it's appropriate that Stevens, reading the novel, sounds like one himself, gently picking his way through the blackly comic tangles of the book's dense plot. Charlie Asher's life is thrown into chaos when his beloved wife unexpectedly dies, and while trying to recover a sense of balance, he finds himself suddenly surrounded by the dead and dying. Stevens's voice is professional and assured, letting the jokes take care of themselves rather than pounding them into submission. Most importantly, Stevens's average-guy voice stands in for Charlie's own increasingly puzzled demeanor, besieged by a world which makes less and less sense, in which the realm of the dead grows ever larger. Simultaneous release with the Morrow hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 20).