Audio book reviews.

The Bone Vault By Linda Fairstein, read by Blair Brown Simon & Schuster Audio It's not very often that novelists who begin with a polemic in mind are capable of weaving a worthwhile story out of it-one with real characters and feeling and an interesting plot. Frank Harris and Upton Sinclair come to mind as two rare examples. Most of the time you end up with stilted ciphers disguised as "characters" spouting stilted political or philosophical nonsense at each other for a couple hundred pages. (Any novel by Ayn Rand comes to mind there.)

Bestselling mystery writer Linda Fairstein clearly began The Bone Vault with a polemic in mind. And even if the results aren't as bad as, say, The Fountainhead, by the halfway point it's pretty clear that the polemic means more to her than anything her characters might be up to.

I've never read-or in this case, listened to-anything else by Fairstein (a former district attorney), so I don't know if this is always the case in her novels. The polemic in focus here is the ransacking of burial sites in Third World countries by European and American museums eager to add authentic artifacts and human remains to their collections. It's a century-old practice that, in recent years, has become a fairly newsworthy topic, what with Native American (and other) groups demanding that various major museums return their forefathers' remains for proper burial.

In The Bone Vault, Fairstein is more concerned with the ill-gotten remains of Africans and Eskimos than with Native Americans-and she also seems awfully concerned with showing everyone how much research she did into the inner workings of the Met and Museum of Natural History. The latter practice is commonplace in contemporary mysteries of the bestselling variety, I've found, and it drives me a little nuts. An author visits a library or goes online to find out all there is to know about landscape architecture, shoe repair or commercial fisheries, then insists on laying it all out in the most tedious way imaginable. It clearly doesn't drive other people nuts, but when it's this obvious, I just want to bang my head against something.

Apart from all that, the plot here is fairly inconsequential. A young woman working on a joint Met-Natural History exhibit is found murdered. Enter Alexandra Cooper, a cookie-cutter D.A. who begins questioning people around both museums (plus the Cloisters!) in an attempt to find out why. Everyone's a suspect, of course, but in the end, most of them seem to be there for the sole purpose of either reciting encyclopedia-entry monologues about the museums, or denouncing (or justifying) the plundering of ancient artifacts. Mostly it's the latter.

Granted, I was listening to an abridged audio version. There were apparently two hefty subplots (one involving a stalker and one involving a missing teenage girl) that seemed to be all but excised. Perhaps in the unabridged version these helped draw attention away from the Cause of the Day, but I doubt it. Christ, there were times when it felt like I was listening to the transcript of some sparsely-attended rally on the steps of the natural history museum.

Blair Brown's reading, I must admit, was quite good. Too bad the material she was given was so unremarkable. With any luck Fairstein will decide to begin her next mystery with a good story in mind instead of righteous indignation.

Resolved By Robert Tanenbaum, read by Lee Sellars Simon & Schuster Audio, 4.5 hours, $26 Much of this 15th entry into Robert Tanenbaum's Butch Karp series is run-of-the-mill. There are hundreds upon hundreds of New York-based thrillers out there that feature an assistant district attorney as the hero-and most of them share a number of elements in common. You got your tough, smart, rational, good-looking hero, some office politics, a serial killer, some family drama, maybe a terrorist or two, an "explosive climax," a "New York" setting that might just as well be Iowa City and tap water prose. Beginning just this past year, these novels also invariably contain a number of references to the attacks.

All of the above are present in Resolved. Butch Karp is an A.D.A. on the verge of being promoted to Manhattan District Attorney. He's trying to raise three kids (one of whom is blind), while at the same time trying to stop a mad bomber who seems to be targeting everyone he knows.

There are, however, a few elements that make Resolved stand out from the rest. Karp's wife, for instance, is a former A.D.A. with quasi-psychopathic tendencies and a vigilante streak who's left the family behind to raise guard dogs far, far away. (I'm assuming earlier entries in the series explained all this-but not knowing the full background made it even more intriguing.) The "faked death prison break" of serial killer Felix Tighe was awfully nifty, too. On a more fundamental level, there were several unexpected plot twists-a rarity, having listened to as many of these things as I have. I was also impressed by the book's narrative structure, which is a bit more complex than most thrillers-and the armful of subplots are woven together quite nicely into a fairly seamless whole.

What impressed me the most about Tanenbaum's novel, though, was the C.H.U.D. factor.

I'm not saying Mr. Tanenbaum plagiarized Douglas Cheek's 1984 classic outright, but one of Resolved's subplots does contain a number of remarkable similarities to the film-a soup kitchen worker who befriends a group of homeless people living in the subway tunnels; a murderous religious zealot among the mole people who, in the end, turns out to be friendly after all; and, most importantly, a subgroup of semi-human Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. (They aren't called C.H.U.D.s in the book, but they live in the tunnels, they're deformed and they eat people-what the hell else could they be?) There's no radioactivity to speak of here, nor any devious government conspiracies, and the soup kitchen worker is a young woman instead of an old hippie, but how many parallels does one astute reader need?

To look at his author photo, Tanenbaum doesn't much look like a man who'd be watching many monster pictures from the mid-80s, but who knows? No matter, though-all I know is that I was actually relieved and delighted, after listening to so many snoozy thrillers, to find myself listening to one with C.H.U.D.s in it.