In this rich audiobook of literary suspense, Samuel Hawley's life story is told through the 12 bullet scars on his body. Narrator Elizabeth Wiley demonstrates her dynamic range in her performance. In the present, Hawley is making a life for himself and his teenage daughter, Loo. The nomadic pair return to Loo's late mother's hometown. She has trouble fitting in but not finding trouble or clues to her parents' past. Wiley portrays con man Hawley and his partner as convincingly as she does a mob of teenage bullies and a young outcast who's coming of age without her mother. Wiley's pacing is a perfect match for the plot's suspense, pulling listeners closer and closer to the edge of their seats so they don't miss a single one of Samuel Hawley's lives.
Pub Date: March 28, 2017
Duration: 13 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781423385400
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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