Jennifer White has dementia. She is a former hand surgeon, independent and prickly, and not enjoying unraveling any more than you would, but that’s not the problem. Someone has murdered Jennifer’s closest friend, Amanda, and surgically removed four of her fingers. Imagine being the detective or the suspect on this case. What does White remember, and when? Is she even capable of dissembling? Jean Reed Bahle’s performance of this gripping puzzle is nothing short of uncanny. When Jennifer, the ultimate unreliable narrator, is in the present, aware of her condition and plight, her voice is that of a 65-year-old. When she has drifted back in time, her timbre modulates to the appropriate age. This remarkable alchemy is performed without pyrotechnics, but it dazzles anyway. A powerful audio experience.
Pub Date: July 5, 2011
Duration: 10 hrs
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
American colleges are favorable locales for ghastly event and hair-tearing circumstance. There is, for instance, a good deal of pleasure to be had out of professor and past-prodigy Grady Tripp's awful life, as portrayed by Michael Chabon in WONDER BOYS. There is a certain amount of slapstick here, but it's balanced by Chabon's superb portrait of a gale-force mid-life crisis, a soul-destroying albatross of an unfinished novel and the mind-numbing inconsequence of writers' conferences. David Colacci sounds a little starved for oxygen in his reading, but that's not exactly out of keeping with Grady Tripp's personal gestalt.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: N/A
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
Class lurks in varying degrees behind every great English comedy, its ineffable code being so endlessly conducive to ironic subtlety. QUEEN LUCIA, the first of the great Lucia novels of E.F. Benson, is imbued with it. Nonetheless, social striving rather than class per se gives the novel its real comic force. At its center is Lucia, the regnant, self-appointed social and cultural leader of a genteel, middle-class circle. She’s a schemer and poser of awesome theatricality and self-delusion. Although the narrative is conducted in the third person, the characters’ doings, most especially Lucia’s, are as often as not reported in the light in which the perpetrators hope to be viewed. Still, the true facts and motivations, usually base, shine luminously through. Geraldine McEwen’s reading truly enhances the work, being a model of cultivated discretion and ironic pacing.
Pub Date: N/A
Duration: 9 hrs
Publisher: ISIS Audio Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2026
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