This is the first day of my vacation, but before I dash off to the museums, the park, the various bars that offer soccer matches on big-screen TVs, I’d thought I’d tell you a bit about our July titles that were chosen for enjoyable summer listening.

Does poolside listening get any better than Susan Isaacs? She has been making me laugh for years with her housewife heroines and sarcastic humor. As Husbands Go features a terrific plot, great characters, and lots of suspense. What’s a happily married mother of triplets to think when her husband winds up dead in a call girl’s apartment? Narrator Hillary Huber “never once allows the listener to break free from the tension...”—(AudioFile)

Bestselling authors Kim Harrison (aka Dawn Cook) and Jeaniene Frost are back with Forgotten Truth and First Drop of Crimson, as well as the latest entry in Stacia Kane’s fabulous Downside Ghosts series, City of Ghosts.

Maybe instead of poolside listening you prefer to spend your summer vacation in your big leather club chair absorbing serious works of historical importance. Grover Gardner’s reading of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich will be a riveting experience. William Hughes reads F. A. Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom. And a new book by Eric Jay Dolin, Fur, Fortune, and Empire, is earning starred reviews: “The fascinating story of the fur trade, full of heroism, greed, violence and political conflict. . . riveting narrative . . . A delightful history…” (Kirkus Reviews ) and “an absorbing story…[with] people as varied as Peter Stuyvesant, John Jacob Astor, Kit Carson, and the roughhewn mountain men." (Publishers Weekly)

I like to stay up late listening to suspense thrillers. I loved debut writer David Carnoy’s Knife Music, which features a handsome surgeon who may or may not be guilty of causing a young girl’s suicide, and the older, polio-stricken police detective who suspects him. “Baffling until the very last page.” (Booklist)

Catherine O’Flynn’s eagerly awaited follow up to What Was Lost is an intriguing literary mystery. The News Where You Are involves an aging newscaster coming to terms with his career and his place in the world after the unsolved death of a colleague.

About John Rector’s noir suspense story, The Cold Kiss, Publishers Weekly said “Dean Koontz fans will find much to like in Rector’s debut,” a contemporary thriller about a couple on the lam. Paul Michael Garcia reads this one.

Maybe your vacation plans require a trip “off world.” We have plenty of destinations to choose from with the best SF and fantasy writers in the universe as your guides. Choose from Ben Bova’s The Return, Lois McMaster Bujold’s Falling Free, Charles de Lint’s Widdershins, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, Robert Sheckley’s Mindswap, and Alex Bledsoe’s The Girls with Games of Blood.

Lots more mysteries, urban lit, current affairs, and history titles to choose from, but I’ve got to run. Hey, save that deck chair—just gotta grab my earphones and a fancy drink with a pink umbrella.