“Lisey’s Story” by Stephen King. Read by Mare Winningham. Unabridged, 19 hours, 16 CDs. Simon & Schuster. $49.95.

In ancient Greek drama, deus ex machina was used when the plot got so out of control that only divine intervention could resolve it. “Lisey’s Story” is the opposite.

Lisey is the widow of a famous author still dealing with grief two years after his death. Her loneliness is convincing, as is the magical place — Boo’ya Moon — where her husband found inspiration and confronted horrors.

What bedevils the plot, though, is an insane stalker who terrorizes Lisey for her husband’s papers. This one-dimensional, inexplicable character clearly arrives for some anti-divine intervention to create chaos. King, however, eventually keeps the plot tidy and unsurprising.

Winningham does a winning job of conveying Lisey’s melancholy as well as other characters’ madness.

Official Stephen King Web site.

“Echo Park” by Michael Connelly. Read by Len Cariou. Unabridged, 10.5 hours, 9 CDs. Hachette Audio. $39.98.

Connelly succeeds once again with his latest Detective Harry Bosch thriller, the second one to feature the L.A. cop working in the Open-Unsolved Unit. This time, a killer caught with body parts in his van agrees to confess to seven other killings, including that of Marie Gesto. She’s a woman who had disappeared 13 years before in a case that Bosch never solved.

Bosch doesn’t believe the new confession, especially since the suspect isn’t the man who has been a “person of interest” over the years.

When the suspect leads a heavily armed group of police and lawyers deep into the woods to show them Marie’s body, things go terribly wrong and the novel’s suspense only deepens.

What makes this book among Connelly’s best is its realism and its patience, as it moves logically through police procedures and Bosch’s decision-making process.

Cariou’s tough, assured performance proves why he is the definitive voice of Harry Bosch.

The novel’s official Web site — including audio excerpts — is here.

“Nature Girl” by Carl Hiassen. Read by Lee Adams. Unabridged, 11.5 hours, 9 CDs. Random House Audio. $39.95.

Honey Santana, the titular character, aims to rid the world of an evil menace with a convoluted plan to change a slimy telemarketer by bringing him to the wilds of Florida’s beautiful Ten Thousand Islands.

A wacky plot, colorful characters, bad decisions and a Florida setting are the main ingredients of Hiassen’s fictional world. And “Nature Girl” includes a half-white, half-Seminole man in the midst of an identity crisis, ghosts, an old bald eagle, a phony religious sect, sexual harassment, a sexy coed, a private investigator, adultery, gambling and gunplay. But it just doesn’t work.

Perhaps it’s because Honey is off her meds, meaning she’s not the usual hypocritical, narcissistic, hubristic hothead that Hiassen’s satire often targets; rather, she’s suffering from a clinical problem, and it’s hard to laugh when that’s the engine of the novel’s unfocused plot.

For the most part, Adams does a good job of keeping the action going and characterizing the main players, but for some reason both the Florida State coed (from Ohio) and a 12-year-old boy sound like Valley Girls.

“State of Denial” by Bob Woodward. Read by Boyd Gaines. Abridged, 7 hours, 6 CDs. Simon & Schuster. $29.95.

This book is difficult to take. I loaded it onto my iPod and listened to it at the gym while TV screens showed captions on CNN and Fox announcing new Iraqi and American casualties in Iraq.

Among the many outrages recounted in the book — advisers too timid to give President Bush bad news, distortions and manipulations by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld (especially in terms of troop requirements), Bush and Karl Rove exchanging fart jokes — what stands out most is Bush’s insistence on body counts of enemy dead as a gauge of progress.

Woodward points out the fallacy of body counts with the example of the Vietnam War, which left more than 1 million Vietnamese and 58,193 Americans dead — and the U.S. still lost.

Woodward does the United States a great service with this hard and necessary look at the inner workings of the Bush administration.

Gaines does a good job in reading the book by giving a straightforward performance to highlight Woodward’s words and quotations, without resorting to impersonations.

A cover story I wrote from the Times Union about two audiobooks by Murakami — clocking in at nearly 1,000 words — is sent out on the wires and any paper that picks up can do whatever they want with it.

Here’s what the link to what the Free Press did with it, including giving star ratings. I feel so Ebert-ish now.

“Ballad of the Whiskey Robber,” by Julian Rubinstein. Narrated by the author, with a cast of 27 others. Unabridged, 11.5 hours. Time Warner Audio Books digital download. $39.98.

Rubinstein’s award-winning nonfiction book from 2004 is subtitled “A True Story of Bank Heists, Ice Hockey, Transylvanian Pelt Smuggling, Moonlighting Detectives, and Broken Hearts,” but even that doesn’t come close to capturing the entertaining wealth of information in the just-released audio version of the book.

The Whiskey Robber is Attila Ambrus, a Transylvanian who escapes communist Romania in 1988 for a better life in Hungary (click on YouTube video above for more about him). There, he lands an unpaid job as a backup goalie to a professional hockey team. Eventually, his desperation leads him to a life of crime. His gentlemanly demeanor and audacity, however, prompt the media to turn him into a folk hero, whose 29 bank robberies and one improbable escape from jail mock the ineffectual and corrupt post-communist government.

What Rubinstein succeeds at doing is telling Ambrus’ fascinating story with unflinching detail and affection while also portraying Hungary in a specific historical moment, the time between the fall of communism and the worldwide changes wrought by 9/11.

Rubinstein’s deadpan narration is the perfect counterpoint to the rich voices, sound effects and music by One Ring Zero, the McSweeney’s house band. The cast includes such notable performers as Eric Bogosian, Tommy Ramone, Demetri Martin and Jonathan Ames, as well as best-selling authors Gary Shteyngart, Arthur Phillips, Samantha Power and Darin Strauss.

Though some voices descend into caricature to get laughs, the production is well grounded in the rich performance by Csaba Bereczky, who performs Ambrus with a commanding gentleness.