As this dark, twisted audiobook begins, Harry Ackerson is just days from college graduation when he receives word that his father has died. Harry returns home to his stepmother, and his quest to find answers to his father's death leads to a suspenseful story of lust, deception, murder, and revenge. Narrator Sarah Mollo-Christensen is effective in voicing distinct characters in a story that alternates between flashbacks and present day. Her pacing and the sense of urgency she creates as the mystery unfolds make for a compelling listen. Listeners should know that the story touches on sensitive topics, including pedophilia, sexual assault, and the long-term impact these have on individuals and families. As with Swanson's previous books, numerous twists and turns keep listeners guessing.
Pub Date: April 3, 2018
Duration: 9 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780062802958
Publisher: Harper 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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