A american audio books

True crime, horror fiction, investigative reporting — and a slacker memoir for (literal) comic relief: worthy listening material for what little of summer we have left.

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Deer Creek Drive: A Reckoning of Memory and Murder in the Mississippi Delta

By Beverly Lowry. Read by the author.

On Nov. 17, 1948, Idella Thompson, a wealthy, white matron and member of the Southern planter aristocracy, was stabbed to death inside her mansion on the fashionable Deer Creek Drive, in Leland, Miss. The daughter who found her, the socialite Ruth Thompson Dickins, told the sheriff she’d caught an unidentified Black man red-handed when she arrived at her mother’s house, but she was soon put on trial herself for the crime. Lowry, who was 10 years old at the time and lived only miles away in Greenville, Miss., weaves the gripping account of the trial — and the crime’s persistent hold over the Delta to this day — with Lowry’s own family history.

Random House Audio, 16 hours, 26 minutes

‘Deer Creek Drive’

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Life Ceremony: Stories

By Sayaka Murata. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori. Read by Nadalie Naudus, Nancy Wu, Jeena Yi, Pun Bandhu, Emily Woo Zeller and Eunice Wong.

By the author of “Convenience Store Woman,” this collection of podcast-length short stories uses dystopian conceits to skewer social norms we didn’t know were so fragile. Cannibalism, Japan’s declining birthrate and class divide all figure into these blunt and deliberately gruesome plots. In “A First-Rate Material,” for instance, an industry has developed to repurpose dead human bodies into fashion items for the living, from bone wedding rings to human hair sweaters. The narrator’s husband forbids her from owning these “barbaric” items, but she deems it a “marvelous and noble process” to turn death into something coveted and luxurious. Cast members read these tales in distinct and absorbing voices that make the author’s eerily astute social observation real for all of us.

Blackstone Publishing, 5 hours, 54 minutes

‘Life Ceremony’

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American Cartel: Inside the Battle to Bring Down the Opioid Industry

By Scott Higham and Sari Horwitz. Read by Kiff VandenHeuvel.

In “American Cartel,” two Washington Post reporters examine the multiplayer supply chain to explain how drug manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies have caused half a million deaths in this country — and counting — during the opioid epidemic. In their meticulous reporting, read in an indignant, no-nonsense cadence by the actor VandenHeuvel, Higham and Horwitz include emails in which executives mocked residents of the Appalachian counties they were illegally pumping with life-threatening drugs as “pillbillies”; and then counter this corporate greed with the heroism of the D.E.A. agents and legal team who would take the companies to court in “the largest and most complex civil litigation in American history.”

Twelve/Hachette Audio, 11 hours, 10 minutes

‘American Cartel’

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The World’s Worst Assistant

By Sona Movsesian. Read by the author and Conan O’Brien.

With a foreword written and read by her comedy veteran boss, Movsesian’s debut, in her words, “details the downfall of my ambition.” Between anecdotes that I can’t quote in this paper and professional advice that, if you take it, could possibly get you fired, Movsesian’s self-owns will make your side hurt. Having assisted Conan since 2009, the author compares the entertainment industry to the movie “The Human Centipede” and urges her listeners to lower their managers’ expectations, to learn how to say no, to never compromise their well-being for the sake of a career. If her ambition has declined, she says there’s one mantra she’s held onto from childhood: “act first — especially if it’s funny — think later.”

Penguin Audio, 5 hours, 25 minutes

‘The World’s Worst Assistant’

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The Fishermen and the Dragon: Fear, Greed, and a Fight for Justice on the Gulf Coast

By Kirk Wallace Johnson. Read by David Lee Huynh.

In the late 1970s, Vietnamese refugees arrived in the U.S. by the hundreds of thousands, many of them settling along the Gulf Coast — where, at the same time, petrochemical plants were leaking oil and other toxins into the water and compromising the otherwise profitable shrimping and crabbing industries. Against this historical backdrop, Johnson builds an exhaustive and disturbing account of how racism drove Billy Joe Aplin, a disgruntled resident of Seadrift, Texas, and his fellow white fishermen to misdirect their personal and economic frustrations onto the Vietnamese, setting the immigrants’ boats and houses on fire and eventually enlisting the might of the Ku Klux Klan. Huynh toggles effortlessly between the American and Vietnamese voices throughout, rendering a sensitive portrait of a clash that was both personal and historical. (Interestingly, where Johnson decided against shielding his readers from the racial slurs that appeared throughout his primary and secondary source material, the audiobook bleeps them out. Johnson explains, “Reading them in quotes is different than hearing them out loud.”)

Penguin Audio, 12 hours

‘The Fishermen and the Dragon’

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The Babysitter Lives

By Stephen Graham Jones. Read by Isabella Star LaBlanc and the author.

On the night before Halloween — and before Charlotte, a half-Native, half-white high school senior, is supposed to take the SAT — she’s hired to look after the well-to-do Wilbanks’s 6-year-old twins, Ronald and Desi. In this psychologically probing, audio-only horror novel, the teenage babysitter’s worst nightmare comes true: She and her charges are not alone in the house, which turns out to have a grisly history.

Simon & Schuster Audio, 7 hours, 34 minutes

‘The Babysitter Lives’

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Lauren Christensen is an editor at the Book Review.