In an upbeat, involving narration of this fun and quirky mystery, Lisa Flanagan does a fine job of allowing listeners to become only as confused as the author intends. Trust her not to let you sink beneath the clues, and you'll have a fine time trying to figure out what the devil mathematician Isaac Severy's posthumous final directive means. You see, Severy, who seems to have committed suicide, left his granddaughter, Hazel, a letter asking her to destroy his work. He promises to explain it all if she follows a list of clues. As Hazel hunts for answers, she's helped and hindered by Isaac's dysfunctional family of mathematicians and by a mysterious corporation. Flanagan handles the action and range of characters with aplomb.
Pub Date: March 6, 2018
Duration: 9 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9781538493182
Publisher: Blackstone 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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