The Resurrectionist, by Jack O’Connell, read by Holter Graham. Unabridged, 11¼ hours. HighBridge Audio, $34.95.

This peculiar novel marries the tale of a druggist named Sweeney, father to a comatose 6-year-old named Danny, to the otherworldly comic-book adventures of a group of circus-sideshow freaks and the “real-world” lives of a motorcycle gang.

The result is a startling reflection on the nature of freakdom and the place of outsiders in any society.

As the book opens, Sweeney has just moved himself and Danny from Cleveland, where Sweeney worked at a CVS and Danny lay in a hospital, to a dying industrial town called Quinsigamond. There, Sweeney has taken a job at the gloomy Peck Clinic, which specializes in unorthodox coma treatments such as putting hot sauce on patients’ tongues. In 10 years, only two patients have arisen from their comas –– but those two are enough to give Sweeney hope.

But there’s more to the eerie Peck — and to the Doctors Peck, father and daughter, who run it — than meets the eye. The motorcycle gang, the Abominations, is tied up with the clinic, and Sweeney is drawn into its orbit. Meanwhile, we get more and more of the story of the freaks of Limbo Comics, especially the chicken boy who is at the heart of the story.

Just as the circus freaks and the Abominations are struggling with their roles in life, Sweeney works to make sense of Danny’s coma. Should he fight it? Embrace it? Try to learn from it?

But this is no academic discourse — it’s an action-filled tale wonderfully read by Graham, whose extraordinary voice offers shading and textures, as well as accents and characterizations, that help you picture the characters right in front of you as the story unfolds.

Look Again, by Lisa Scottoline, read by Mary Stuart Masterson, with an interview with Scottoline. Unabridged, 10 hours. Macmillan Audio, $39.95.

Scottoline has made her reputation by writing thrillers featuring plucky women lawyers in peril in Philadelphia. Now she breaks out of the mold –– sort of –– by choosing as her protagonist a plucky, imperiled Philly woman who’s a newspaper reporter.

Naturally, Ellen Gleason’s paper is having economic problems, and near the story’s beginning, its charismatic Brazilian editor lays off two reporters, with a promise of a third to come by the end of the month. (If only real newspapers had layoffs in such tiny numbers.)

Ellen is worried that she might be next. But she has bigger concerns, too: On one of those “missing kids” postcards that come in the mail, she’s seen a photo of a boy who is a dead ringer for the child she adopted two years earlier as a sickly baby. Is it possible that her little Will is really the missing Timothy Braverman?

Given that this is a Scottoline book, you know there’s going to be some danger involved, and maybe some romance. But the former lawyer’s choice of a world with which she’s less familiar than the courts and classrooms of her previous protagonists seems to throw her off stride; the action is slow, even a little tedious.

Scottoline says in an interview at the end of the book that she wanted to focus outside the legal realm to prove that her books are really novels about women, not about the law. But the old advice to write what you know would have served her well here.

Masterson — a TV and movie actress who starred in Fried Green Tomatoes, among many other projects — doesn’t always differentiate vocally among the characters, as the best audio-book readers do. But she does so often enough, especially with the sexy Brazilian editor, to add something worthwhile to Scottoline’s writing.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s assistant managing editor for breaking news.

arosenbe@projo.com