At the beginning of this unusual and compelling book, Aimee Bruneau struggles a little with the emphases of sentences, a weakness that is occasionally distracting. As the story gathers power, though, she drops into gear, and narrator and story become a thrilling combination. At first, the book seems another version of an oft-told tale: the small- town murder of a young woman, possibly serial. But Hoffman has a different design in mind, an original device made of familiar parts, prejudice against educated outsiders and a young woman journalist crusading against misogyny and worse. These elements work together in quite unexpected ways and rachet toward a stunning climax. Bruneau effectively builds sympathy for her characters and sustains the listener’s deftly managed misapprehension about where the plot is going.
Pub Date: March 15, 2011
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781611200607
Publisher: Dreamscape
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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