The audio book of Stone Cold by David Baldacci, left, is read by a former Rhode Islander, Ron McLarty.

Selections from Dreamsongs, Volume II: Stories of Fantasy, Horror/Sci-Fi, and a Man Called Tuf: Unabridged Selections, by George R.R. Martin, read by Claudia Black, Mark Bramhall, Scott Brick, Emily Janice Card, Roy Dotrice, Kim Mai Guest, Kirby Heybourne and Adenrele Ojo. Random House Audio, 17 hours, $34.95.

Normally, I shy away from short-story collections on audio. I listen to audio books in the car or while walking my dog, for only 20 or 30 minutes at a stretch, and it’s hard enough to keep the thread with a single story spread over several hours and several listening sessions. Starting and stopping a new story every time or two can make it so hard to remember who’s who and what’s what that it just isn’t worth the effort.

But these stories, from the creator of the popular sword-and-sorcery fantasy series A Song of Fire and Ice, are worth the risk of mental dislocation. Almost all create a unique world well worth visiting, even if you’re not a big fan of the horror sensibility that animates many of them. In fact, they’re far better than the work in the first part of this three-part series — unsurprising, perhaps, in that they represent Martin at a later, and moreskilled, place in his career.

Take Sandkings, for instance, a story about a cruel rich man who pits alien creatures against one another for sport. In this tale, which won both of science fiction’s highest honors, the Hugo and Nebula awards, Martin takes great care in creating the protagonist, wealthy Simon Kress; the shop where Kress buys the sandkings, Wo and Shade; and the sandkings, tiny offworlders — not unlike ants — who build castles of sand and rock, and who decorate them with visages of their owners, who are their gods.

Kress’s ill-advised manipulation of the sandkings’ warlike nature contains the seeds of his destruction, in classic fashion — but it’s the getting there that makes his eventual, inevitable downfall so delicious. And in one of the extensive sections of commentary that also distinguishes these collections, Martin discloses that he’d intended a “Wo and Shade” series, just as he’d intended many others, but that for various reasons only a handful of these series ever came about.

(If the story seems familiar even though you’ve never read Martin, by the way, it may be because he’s also written for TV, and adapted Sandkings in 1995 for an episode of The Outer Limits.)

One of Martin’s series that flourished, of course, was A Song of Fire and Ice. Another was a group of stories about Haviland Tuf, an interstellar trader and ecological engineer who’s a hard bargainer with his own definition of righteousness. There are two Tuf stories here, including the one that launched the series.

And how did the hero of the eventual collection Tuf Voyaging get his distinctive name? Martin says the choice was deliberate: When he looked across genres at long-running series, ones that featured characters such as detective fiction’s Sherlock Holmes and sci-fi’s Retief, he noted that all had unusual monickers, and he made a conscious decision to add a name to that roster.

Veteran British character actor Roy Dotrice reads the Tuf stories with relish, giving the trader a throaty r-laden accent that makes him sound like a pirate. The rest of the performers — including many of audio books’ best — are equally skilled, helping make this book a winner.

Stone Cold, by David Baldacci, read by Ron McLarty. Abridged, 6 hours. Hachette Audio, $31.98.

The name “Oliver Stone” is familiar to moviegoers: He’s the director of such stark, often-paranoia-driven films as JFK.

Baldacci’s Oliver Stone, too, sees enemies wherever he goes. This Stone is the nom de guerre of an ex-CIA killer named John Carr, who has formed “the Camel Club,” a group of conspiracy theorists who mean to keep an eye on America’s leaders.

In this, the third of Baldacci’s Camel Club novels, Stone finds himself working with Annabelle Conroy, an honorary member of the group who’s also a beautiful, smart con artist. She has ripped off casino boss Jerry Bagger for $40 million, from the best of motives: He killed her mother, and she wanted revenge. Now it’s Bagger who’s looking to get back at Annabelle.

Stone has pledged to help Annabelle, but there’s this inconvenient problem: People from Stone’s past keep dying, and he has figured out he might be next.

Baldacci weaves the strands of his plot flawlessly, with an attention to detail and character that set this book above the normal run of Washington thriller. McLarty, the actor-author who grew up in East Providence, assists with a fine set of accents (his Irish brogue for Annabelle’s father, Paddy, is particularly good) that let listeners easily distinguish among the many characters.

Alan Rosenberg is The Journal’s South County regional editor.