Penzler, the Czar of Crime Fiction, assembles 14 stories of jealousy, justice, and intrigue in and around the tennis courts. Dan John Miller shows a clean backhand as with skillful vocal fluidity he takes listeners from the grass courts of Wimbledon to the clay courts of Florida. The stories in this anthology are surprisingly deep and poignant, and Miller’s sincere tone drives them home. Otto Penzler’s clever introduction is followed by Lawrence Block’s “Terrible Tommy Terhune,” which looks at the fate of a temperamental tennis star. “A Debt to the Devil,” by Jeremiah Healy, investigates the death of a Florida senior who lives in a tennis-centered retirement village. Stephen Hunter’s story, “Stephen Longacre’s Greatest Match,” follows a troubled young white man who pushes the color barrier in the American South of the 1940s. Eleven other stories of the “sport of gentlemen” fill out this anthology.
Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2010
Duration: 10 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781441880161
Publisher: Brilliance 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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