Keith Szarabajka adds a fatherly tone to his gravelly voice as he narrates this wonderfully bizarre police procedural. Fresh out of rehab, detective Willow Wylde works cold cases near Detroit, where he finds himself investigating a support group whose members are possessed by the spirits of slain children. While the hard-boiled writing style and disturbing title are jarring, the book's premise, along with the voices of the child characters, is oddly tender and uplifting. Conveying paradox, Szarabajka's gritty voice sounds as though he's telling a bedtime story. He articulates the voices of the supporting characters, adults and children, but is strongest in the voice of Willow Wylde. This unforgettable novel with its mind-bending premise is, ultimately, a tale of redemption.
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2018
Duration: 12 hrs, 15 mins
DD ISBN: 9780525532859
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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