Lauren Fortgang narrates this dark yet humorous ghost story. Her dry and borderline gloomy tone shapes Tuesday Mooney, who solves a carefully crafted mystery with the help of an eclectic, thrill-seeking group of secondary characters. The group includes her sarcastic late best friend, who pops up at inopportune times. The delight of Fortgang's narration is her ability to make the listener laugh while wondering what will happen to Tuesday next. Her low points suggest a comically unstable person whom Fortgang hilariously conveys to perfection. Fortgang can be both sad-sack drunk and unfiltered loner as well as over-the-top investigator. Overall, Fortgang moves rapidly through the story, keeping the adventurous momentum going.
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
Duration: 14 hrs
DD ISBN: 9780358172123
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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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