One of the great pleasures of reviewing audio books, apart from the obvious boon of free review copies for the addicted listener, is being assigned books you’ve never heard of that delight or astonish. At the top of my list of terrific audio crime fiction discovered on the job, I’d put The Verdict by Nick Stone. Stone has been much praised and prized in Europe, but in spite of having been called the English John Grisham, he has flown under the radar here. The Verdict deserves to change that. Stone’s hero narrator, Terry Flynt, is a working class legal hustler who gets a shot at a career-making murder case. The problem? The defendant is someone from his past whom he knows well, and detests. Cue the long-buried secrets, dazzling plot turns, moral dilemmas and a smashing court room finale. If you’ve ever wanted to clone Scott Turow so there would be twice as many smart legal thrillers, Nick Stone has got your number, plus you get all those barristers’ wigs and British accents, all of which narrator David Thorpe nails with easy grace, making for a sensationally entertaining listen.
A similar pleasure, American this time, is The Defense by Steve Cavanagh. Cavanaugh’s hero Eddie Flynn is a con-man turned hardscrabble defense lawyer. Tired of dealing with his bruising clientele, he is trying to retire when a Russian mafia boss conveys that he would like to hire Eddie by handing him a bag containing the head of his former lawyer as a sort of retainer. And, oh yes, he has kidnapped Eddie’s young daughter and is holding her pending a satisfactory verdict. The plot takes off like a rocket and never lets up as Eddie, who has his own arsenal of cons and dodges, negotiates hairpin turns and double and triple crosses. Narrator Adam Sims is dazzling as he maintains a blistering pace in a range of accents from Little Italy to Little Odessa. The plot’s roster of courthouse characters is mad fun, and Eddie himself, in spite of having done any number of appalling things in his bespattered career, is so game and resourceful that you can’t help cheering for him. It is also cheering to report that there are now two more Eddie Flynn thrillers in print, although only one, The Plea, is available on audio so far, again performed by Adam Sims.
Obviously, casting the right actor for the demands of the material is crucial to the success of any audiobook, but especially in crime novels which so often present special demands as to pacing and accents. As a writer myself of mystery novels with social comedy mixed in, as well as an audio addict, I can report that one of the toughest casting tricks is to find an actor who can do drama and suspense but also recognize when the writing is funny, particularly when the author uses irony or deadpan humor.
Some writers of fiction try to solve this problem by performing their own novels, since no one knows better than the author how a sentence should be delivered, but very few of us can actually act. An even less intuitive pitfall is casting a well-known film or television star, hoping to make a splash. All too often the screen actor has no idea how to do with voice alone what he is accustomed to do with facial expression, body language and the power of personal beauty. But once in a while, the listener hits the trifecta. A delight of last season was Once a Crooked Man, written and performed by David McCallum, of Man From Uncle, NCIS, and a million plays and movies fame. This Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight-style caper is a triple treat, a fresh and charming plot, with a McGuffin that could only have been written by an actor, performed by a gifted narrator who knows exactly what each sentence should sound like and do for the story. His protagonist, actor Harry Murphy, is a Candide figure, a sweet guy who discovers by accident that a fellow he never met is going to be whacked by mobsters, and decides to prevent it. This effort doesn’t go well and attracts the displeasure of some very unpleasant people. I particularly love how concretely McCallum reasons his way through a scene, what it would feel like and smell like to do what Harry is doing, how much strength it would take, where exactly he’d put his left foot. Harry works through a problem physically, as an actor works out a performance, more than as a writer describes a scene he may not understand from the inside out. Books that take you inside somebody else’s world of knowledge or craft are always a special pleasure and this one does that, both in the writing and the plotting. And of course, it is both darkly and sweetly funny, and beautifully performed, a winning combination.
I love crime fiction puzzles in which the investigator is working with emotional intelligence available to all of us, rather than with specialized forensic or technical skills, so Michael Robotham’s Shatter knocked my socks off. This is the third in a series featuring psychologist Joe O’Loughlin, but the first to be performed by Sean Barrett, who is perfectly matched to the material. A special challenge here for the performer is that both the villain and the hero use psychology, one as a weapon to manipulate and kill, the other as a tool to heal and save. Barrett has to convey how much killer and hero resemble each other, while still allowing the listener to know instinctively which one is whispering in his ear. Barrett is brilliant, and the audiobook effective to the point of excruciating. The Wreckage, the next in the audio series, is different in setting and technique, dealing with the disappearance of zillions of dollars in aid money to Iraq, but equally enthralling, showing Robotham’s range and Barrett’s. Two more Joe O’Loughlins performed by Barrett are available and let’s hope more are on the way.
There are narrators whose work you trust and relish so deeply that any entry in one of their series is met with glad cries. George Guidall’s warm, lived-in voice and consummate narrative skills as he performs Tony Hillerman’s Navajo mysteries, is certainly on anyone’s list, and equally his work on Daniel Silva’s international thrillers. But then we have the indelible audio versions of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, in which the narrators are perforce all different. The first entry, In the Woods, appeared ten years ago, a fascinating novel in which Det. Rob Ryan finds himself working on a grizzly crime that resembles the horrifying thing that happened to him when he was a boy, the event that made him a detective. Performed by Steven Crossley, this is both literary fiction and completely effective genre writing, an event for fans of crime writing. Each subsequent Murder Squad novel centers on a different detective on the squad, and is performed by a different actor, but the writing and production values are consistently stellar. None are to be missed.
