Failed author Harry Bloch writes a sex-fantasy column called “Slut Whisperer” for a HUSTLER-type magazine and ghostwrites student papers on the side. This darkly comic character offers a well-met challenge for narrator Bronson Pinchot. When Bloch is summoned by serial killer Darien Clay, who is on death row, to write his true confessions, Pinchot’s storytelling ably transitions from the narrative voice of the self-deprecating Jewish author to that of the truly evil man in prison. Other characters who are well portrayed are Clay’s hard-bitten attorney, Bloch’s teenaged business manager for the ghostwriting business, and the stripper sister of one of Clay’s victims, who becomes Bloch’s lover. Gordon’s thriller is interspersed with bizarre voyages into Bloch’s soft-porn vampire and fantasy tales. Pinchot negotiates all these elements with alacrity and humor.
Pub Date: March 9, 2010
Duration: 8 hrs
Publisher: Blackstone 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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