Narrator Ray Porter resurrects quintessential noir detective Philip Marlowe with the expected hard-boiled unflappability. But Porter also reveals the unprecedented insecurities of this Marlowe, who is now 72, and careful to hide his physical limitations and accompanying feelings of vulnerability. This new story, which takes place in 1988, places Marlowe in Mexico and California, where he is chasing a likely insurance fraud. A body that washes up on a beach is identified by Mexican police as that of a rich gringo. After he is quickly cremated, his bewitching widow responds with a suspicious journey to a series of quaint Mexican hotels. Like the original novels by Raymond Chandler, this tale is woven with finely crafted phrases rich with nuance, and Porter's staccato delivery does justice to their provenance.
Pub Date: July 24, 2018
Duration: 7 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9781984828033
Publisher: Random House 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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