This debut novel, written by two journalists and an editor, shines a satirical light on today's celebrity-obsessed culture. When John Doe, a renowned chef who is host of the traveling food show "Last Call," dies on location in Belfast, co-workers and strangers try to ride his coattails to their own fame. Fliakos illuminates Katie's manipulativeness as she tries to jump-start her foundering career. Paolo, a fellow chef who is traveling with Doe and is the person who found his body, sounds nervous as he shares only part of the story. Fliakos gives Nia, Doe's manager, a tone of competence as he attempts to control the negatives of Doe's death through social media posts. Charlie, a bellhop from Belfast, is bestowed with an Irish brogue as he recounts a version of events that is intended to cast suspicion on Paolo.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2022
Duration: 7 hrs, 30 mins
DD ISBN: 9780593629048
Publisher: Penguin 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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