Narrator Graeme Malcolm is convincing when pronouncing Danish place names, a good thing in a Copenhagen-based thriller, and he's not terrible at dialogue. Unfortunately, he seems not to understand that the narrative material between characters' speeches is part of the story and delivers it in an absentminded singsong, as you might the boilerplate at the beginning or end of a fairy tale. "So the king proclaimed that tomorrow would be the wedding, and . . ." It's a shame, as the plot is well made, if baroque, and many of the characters convincingly drawn. If a murder can be said to be fun, watch for the one in the middle of a ballet at the Royal Danish Theatre. (Engberg is a former dancer and choreographer.) A chandelier is involved.
Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2020
Duration: 10 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781508299394
Publisher: Simon & Schuster 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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