Eve Passeltiner and Robert Fass use their varied vocal talents to good effect in this intriguing mystery, set amid the artist community of Florence in 1557. The novel takes the form of more than 150 short letters that document the progress of an inquiry into the murder of an artist who was working on frescoes in San Lorenzo. With more than a dozen different letter writers--male and female, including the investigator, Vasari; his patron, Cosimo de Medici; Michaelangelo himself; and several suspect nuns--it can be confusing to keep track of them all. Perhaps more variation in accent or tone might have helped. But the mystery sweeps one along, and for anyone interested in Renaissance art, this is a fascinating story full of detailed historical research.
Pub Date: June 3, 2025
Duration: 9 hrs
DD ISBN: 9798331958923
Publisher: Tantor Media
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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