A woman stumbles into the road one night and is struck by a car. Is she really Lena Beck, who disappeared more than a dozen years ago? Jane Collingwood, Nicky Diss, and Simon Slater narrate as three parts of a fractured triangle brought together by a terrifying abduction. Slater embodies gruff Matthias, a grieving father whose search for his daughter has driven him to the brink. Collingwood's young Hannah seems remarkably well adjusted for an adolescent recluse, but her secret depths are subtly hinted at through tone and other vocal cues. As the possible Lena, Diss expertly portrays a woman nearly shattered by her experiences and uncertain of how to pick up the pieces. Despite some minor editing flaws, this mind-bending thriller is sure to enthrall listeners.
Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
Duration: 11 hrs
DD ISBN: 9781250772466
Publisher: Macmillan 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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