AUDIO BOOKS : `ALMOST ADAM' SPINS TALE ABOUT MODERN MISSING LINK.

Byline: Dick Lochte and Tom Nolan 

A number of new high-profile, high-concept novels seem to rely heavily on the reader's ability to suspend disbelief. A case in point is Petru Popescu's ``Almost Adam'' (Audio Renaissance Tapes, six hours, abridged; $24), a yarn that asks us to accept the premise that, somewhere in the African wilderness, there exists a race of primates similar to the ape-humans who roamed the Earth several million years ago. Popescu does present some paleoanthropic theory that helps to make his hominids a bit more feasible and if it's enough to get you over the hump, you'll probably enjoy this entertaining tale of adventure and suspense, told against a backdrop of a politically volatile Africa.

Its protagonist, Ken Lauder, is a noble young paleoanthropologist who, with his geologist pal Ngili Nglamena, discovers the skeleton of one of the protohumans. His efforts to learn more about the find stirs up both politicians and scientists, and before long he's been targeted by the military, poachers, mercenaries and a murderous museum curator who wants to claim the missing links for himself.

This might be dismissed as just another good guy-bad guy battle were it not for the fascinating, lengthy sequences that occur once Lauder, left to die by his contemporaries, is taken in by the primates. Popescu's descriptions of their lifestyle, rituals and rules are unique and gripping enough to satisfy any adventure fan. And the narration by Joseph Campanella, a veteran of more than a thousand TV appearances, not to mention stage, screen and radio, is properly crisp and efficient. A strong, straightforward delivery definitely helps to make believers of us all.

``Character Above All, Volume Two: David McCullough on Harry S. Truman'' (Simon & Schuster Audio; $12) presents a wonderfully informative and entertaining one-hour 1995 lecture, the basis of a section in editor Robert A. Wilson's book of essays on American presidents. McCullough, Truman's Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, ably communicates his admiration for the ``former haberdasher, Pendergast hack and ordinary middle-American'' about whom his fellow citizens said both, ``He was one of us,'' and ``To err is Truman.'' It was his Missouri farm upbringing and his World War I service that critically shaped Truman's character, McCullough concludes.

The historian draws a parallel between Truman's battlefield courage and his rallying of dispirited party faithful at the 1948 Democratic convention, preceding an election that virtually everyone in the country but Truman expected the incumbent president to lose. ``There was no ambiguity'' about Harry Truman, says McCullough, who also notes ``give 'em hell Harry's'' mistakes and failings. ``You might not agree with him, but you knew where he stood.''

FDR's successor often stood on the unpopular side of an issue - the dismissal of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the desegregation of the armed services, recognition of the new state of Israel - but principle was more important to Truman than politics, his biographer believes. ``It makes no difference what the papers say, ``if you're right,'' Truman contended. He also pondered rhetorically, ``I wonder how far Moses would have gone if he'd taken a poll in Egypt.'' Rich with anecdote and insight, McCullough's lively and absorbing talk is a model of its kind.

``Morse's Greatest Mystery and Other Stories,'' by Colin Dexter, read by James Nelson (Durkin Hayes Audio, unabridged; $24.99) collects 10 short stories in their entirety, five featuring Dexter's celebrated ale-swilling opera-loving curmudgeonly Thames Valley police inspector Morse. (Six, if you count a cameo appearance.)

In the brief but satisfying title piece, Inspector Morse gets to the bottom of a Christmas charity-fund robbery in typically idiosyncratic fashion - staying true to the spirit of Christmas, Dickens and the law, all in a mere six pages. In another episode, Morse mulls the puzzle of a talkative chap's chance encounter with a wartime crush, who now bears little resemblance to the young woman he knew.

The crimes in these brain-teasers are mostly nonfatal (though there are two long Morse murder mysteries, one featuring a story-within-the-story) and the tone is generally light, with emphasis on the crossword-clever tricks and twists at which the author excels. Expect biters to be bit, two-timers to be triple-crossed and the reader/listener to be hoodwinked. (Not even Sherlock Holmes, featured here in a non-Morse entry, is safe from Dexter's stratagems.)

British actor Nelson (veteran, if we're not mistaken, of dozens of English TV productions, including some of Inspector Morse's) does a bang-up job with these yarns; he even delivers a passel of more-than-passable American accents for a card-player's sting tale set in the good ol' U.S. of A.

In ``Cruising Paradise,'' by Sam Shepard and read by the author (Random House Audiobooks, two hours; $16), a well chosen collection of unabridged pieces from the playwright-actor's book of fiction stories, vignettes sketches, fragments, monologues and dialogues, a couple of recurring male voices predominate.

The typical Shepard man has lost his way. Alienated from a heartland America he was once so eager to escape, he is haunted by painful memories of vanished family and uncomprehending lovers. A solitary traveler grown weary but not wise from years of chasing romance of one sort or another, he's Hemingway's hero after Vietnam, Kerouac's wanderer with a post-'60s sensibility.

Another Shepard prototype is, like the author, a movie actor, usually found in some exotic locale, trying to work his way into a role under the unhelpful eye of a pretentious director. The actor's often humorous tales nicely convey the mix of adventure, absurdity, angst and tedium of a movie company on location. But Shepard's actor, like the more somber stories' figures, yearns for the authentic. He relishes the juxtaposition of Mexican spontaneity, say, with the ``bewildering madness'' and ignorance of intruding gringos.

Shepard the writer has a knack for pulling the strands of his prose pieces taut in the pull of a final sentence. Shepard the reader does full justice to this compelling material.

Martin Cruz Smith's ``Rose,'' read by Michael York (Random House Audiobooks, four hours, abridged; $23.50) is an extraordinary romance-suspense adventure, set in 1872 in the English coal-mining town of Wigan. It's a grotesque place, as conjured by Smith, nearly worthy of the first book of Dante.

Into the foul and dismal Wigan hurtles Jonathan Blair, a notorious American mining engineer just back in semi-disgrace from Africa. To secure the means to continue his career, he assumes the task of finding out what happened to missing cleric John Maypole, fiance of the Wigan bishop's daughter. Blair believes Maypole's disappearance, which coincided with a disastrous mine explosion, is linked to the clergyman's obsession with a ``pit girl'' named Rose.

The book is filled with memorable tableaux - of the miners at ghostly work and at brutal play, and of the wealthy family that runs the town like philanthropic despots (``Orphans are the price of coal''). Smith re-creates this 19th-century place in such sensuous detail, you can practically taste the coal dust. Unfortunately, the central surprise upon which this story hinges seems both a bit predictable and a little absurd. But that hardly negates the many pleasures to be found in his sooty world of wonders.

This four-hour audio condensation does a fairly good job of conveying some of the novel's moods and textures; and Michael York performs with energy, though his American accent is no less weird than that of most English actors.

As opposed to Smith's creation of the grim English village of Wigan, Lillian Jackson Braun, in the course of numerous mystery novels about Jim Qwilleran and his psychic Siamese cats, has created awonderfully comfortable, if homicidally active, little Middle American town called Pickax. In ``The Cat Who Said Cheese'' (Dove Audio, three hours; $17.95) the busy little burg is the setting for a tangy tale involving a murderous bomber, a mysterious femme fatale, a grumpy man of property, a book of recipes and Gruyere, Brie and Feta. As usual, the cats, Koko and Yum Yum, have a paw in solving the crime. Braun carefully avoids the cuteness that has laid low many a soft-boiled series. But her good work can be undone on cassette, as it has in the past, by the wrong narrator. In this instance, Quill's 18th brush with foul play is given a fair reading by Mason Adams, who in his early years performed on radio soaps and in his middle years was the boss of television's Lou Grant.

Finally, after issuing 26 volumes of radio's Golden Age adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce respectively, most of them not heard since the mid-1940s, Simon & Schuster, like Rathbone himself, decided enough was enough.

But the series continued after Rathbone's departure, with Bruce and the writing team of Anthony Boucher and Denis Green remaining in place and Tom Conway, the Falcon of movie fame, donning the deerstalker. Now, happily enough, Nova Books and 221 ``A'' Baker Street Associates Inc. are making these available, too. ``More New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Vols. 1-4'' (Nova Audio Books, one hour; $9.95 each), the first batch of eight shows on four handsomely packaged volumes, finds Conway a more than adequate substitute for Rathbone. The stories by Boucher and Green are hugely entertaining and, in one or two instances, involve race relations and murdered schoolboys.

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3 Photos

Photo: (1) Joseph Campanella

Narrates ``Almost Adam''

(2 ) Colin Dexter

Creator of Inspector Morse

(3) Michael York

Reads Smith's ``Rose''