Sandcastle Girls / Chris Bohjalian 299 p.

I enjoyed Bohjalian's Night Strangers, in which a pilot, having flubbed a water landing (absolutely brilliantly depicted), copes by moving his family to New England where his family are stalked by seriously creepy witches.  The Sandcastle Girls is entirely different.  The backdrop here is the Armenian genocide, in which a wealthy young American woman doing mission work with Armenian refugees in Aleppo meets an Armenian man with a terrible past, leading to not-entirely-unforeseen plot twists, lifelong secrets, etc.  Toggling back and forth between the present and the long past, we have two audio readers, one perfect, the other with a kittenish diction completely inappropriate for a novel about mass murder, rape and starvation.  This may  have been a great read in print; the audio earns a C+.

The Aleppo Codex: a True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible / Matti Friedman 298 p.

The Codex is a one thousand year old copy of the Hebrew Bible which was safeguarded by the Jewish community of Aleppo, Syria, for most of those years until a period of rioting in the aftermath of the creation of the state of Israel forced the 'Crown of Aleppo' underground.  It eventually was transported to Jerusalem and is currently housed in the Israel Museum, minus about 200 pages.

Friedman's book is the story of the move from Aleppo to Jerusalem, and of what happened to those 200 pages along the way.  He devoted years of research to this, and in telling the story of the Crown the reader learns quite a bit about the early years of Israel's existence.  Interesting, but a bit dry and ultimately unsatisfying.  It isn't Friedman's fault that he wasn't able to answer all the questions here - he had a lot of trouble getting the key players to talk, dead/murdered men keeping their secrets and all that, but it gives the book a flat quality.