Robert Glenister is the man in this fine performance of Robert Galbraith’s (aka J.K. Rowling) most recent detective thriller. Having narrated the first two books in the series, Glenister knows the main characters—Cormoran Strike, Afghan War vet turned PI, and his smart, increasingly talented assistant, Robin Ellacott—to a fare-the-well. In this thoroughly involving story, both Strike and Ellacott are targeted by a killer, who starts the action with a severed leg delivered to Ellacott. The real-life pacing and vocal differences between the rough-hewn, older Strike and the younger Ellacott bring their scenes particularly to life. And Glenister’s use of a flattened, even tone for the sections that take place inside the mind of the killer adds chillingly to the tension.
Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2015
Duration: 18 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781478962670
Publisher: Hachette 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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