If you listen to audiobooks in the car, prepare to find yourself sitting in the driveway with this one. Julia Whelan does a near flawless job delivering this palpitation-inducing psychological thriller from the great Dennis Lehane. She's good at accents, switching ages and genders, and her pacing is impeccable. Rachel Childs, the only child of a beautiful, very smart, very damaged mother, is looking for her father, whose identity she never knew. Always a great setup, but Lehane is using it as a springboard to explain how Rachel falls into a totally different swamp of deceptions. Whelan struggles with pronouncing "atheneum," and someone "demured" at one point instead of demurring, or this performance would be a bases-loaded home run. Maybe is anyway.
Pub Date: May 9, 2017
Duration: 12 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780062129437
Publisher: Harper 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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