Josh

Shoehorned sequel: Repetitive, too-crowded narrative, badly cast narrator

Revisado: 03-08-25

This had absolutely none of the delicate craft of Jackson, nor her captivating ambiguity. Instead, we get a repetitive slog through alternating viewpoints of characters that never seem to avoid saying the same thing they did last time their PoV was in the driver's seat. The total actual events, if told once -- even while going through each PoV's experience of it -- without repeating information should have been about 40% of the length. I also literally don't think the author knows how to craft a scene where people aren't yelling or fighting.

What we do get of the story is crowded, and has nothing to do with Hill House. This was essentially an unrelated story that was for some reason repurposed to be this sequel.

The audio direction is almost more like an audio drama than an audiobook. Too many attempts at sound effects. The voice actor is badly matched to the role, particularly when she has to "sing" the songs. Narrator needed to be able to sing, and needed to sound the right age.

Poorly conceived and badly executed overall.

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Please bring more of his books to Audible.

Revisado: 07-26-23

I do not agree with everything the author writes, but I find his methodological transparency refreshing and I find his method persuasive.

The narration was good, but sometimes the first sound of a sentence would get clipped, so it sounded like the first word was missing.

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Fascinating book; terrible reader

Revisado: 05-25-22

This is a very interesting book of comparative political history that I am reading in advance of Fujiyama's more recent works. Overall, I found his previous book more interesting.

The narrator of this is terrible. He speaks slowly, which is ordinarily fine, even good when doing so would enhance clarity or emphasis, but his pauses are all wrong and obscure the grammatical relation of phrases and clauses. He has odd emphasis on ending sss sounds that make the most banal details feel sinister. The reader for The End of History and The Last Man was excellent; I wish they'd gotten him to do this instead.

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Boring writing and lack of any narrative arc

Revisado: 11-21-18

I was very disappointed by this book. I am a big fan of Bricker and her colleagues at Crime Writers On, and I was not expecting to be writing this review, but this is what I think of the book and I need to be honest. I'll certainly read the next one she writes (and I do hope she writes another), but this one didn't do it for me.

The Narration:

I'll start with the things that aren't Bricker's fault. This narrator was milquetoast trying too hard. Tanya Eby speaks in what sounds like the volume of a normal voice, but she is performing in a breathy whisper that sounds overdramatic. This comes out most strongly when the narrator announces the chapter numbers. The final syllable is often inflected up, as if she were trying to make the chapter number sound dramatic somehow. It feels both cheap and ridiculous. The narrator sounds like she is trying to imitate an old woman, the type that would typically narrate one of the C-level back titles by Ann Rule. I expect the publisher knows the target demographics better than me, but Rule's catalog, after The Stranger Beside Me, is mostly tawdry meditations on evil designed to make old women clutch their pearls. Lara Bricker is young and hip, and I think she deserved better. (So did the story. The vocal allusion to the type of tawdry Ann Rule cases paints Julie Keown's with the same brush, which is undeserved.)

The Writing:

Bricker's writing has almost no awareness of any larger narrative arc, as each chapter feels like it is a news article telling a piece of the story from that chapter's primary interviewee's recollection. Kudos for Bricker for trying to include lots of voices, but each chapter feels completely isolated from the rest rather than part of some whole story. Details are constantly repeated, with no signal at all from the narrator to the audience demonstrating awareness that the audience already knows x or y piece of information. Bricker hasn't told us a story, she's given us a 30,000 word AP style article, broken into 30-odd sections that don't know they are sitting next to each other. Even Bricker's attribution tags are straight AP style, with no variation. There is no sense of narrative at all, no story. Just detail after detail that feels like padding.

These might be assets for doing traditional journalism, but for a book-length treatment, it's almost unreadable.

The Case:

The case Bricker follows is interesting, but perhaps only at the 3-star level. If you've read one story like this, you've read this story. There is a detective, a family, a cluster of personal and professional acquaintances who are by turns saddened by the murder and shocked at the lies of the perpetrator. The killer's mother stands by him to the last, and there are tinges of odd behavior from her at times, but the killer's mother never gets interesting in the way Ruth Coe (mother of the South Hill Rapist) does. But, at its heart, though the case stretched on for four years, there isn't actually much interesting information, and Bricker's narrative technique makes everything feel like filler.

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More about small group dynamics than culture

Revisado: 08-15-18

I found the choice of examples interesting, but this feels like it's primarily fueled by pop psychology than anything else. It also doesn't really pertain to culture so much as small group dynamics. Even when he talks about large companies, he is still talking more about small group dynamics.

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Mostly good narrator, except for when he whispers

Revisado: 03-31-17

Any additional comments?

The narrator did a good job, but when he tried to whisper he sounded awful, like some sort of Kiefer Sutherland imitator. Most of that was in Part 1, and it got a lot better for most of the rest of the book.

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Read "Lost City of the Monkey God" instead

Revisado: 03-31-17

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

Not necessarily. I wanted another tour-de-force like Preston's "Lost City of the Monkey God" and it didn't deliver. I get that this is a more personal story, but I just found myself not caring about the author's journey of self-discovery.

What does Jef Brick bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

He did a fantastic job bringing the narrator's daughter to life. That honestly was the high point of the narration.

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Feels like it was written in the 70s

Revisado: 08-30-16

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

No. Ms. Rule's descriptions feel like they never escaped the 70s. All of her cases seem to hinge on the 'inexpressible barbarity' of the crimes with a complete lack of self-awareness of the fact that none of was shocking in 2014 when this was released. (Terrible crimes, yes, absolutely, but they act as if the audience had never heard of a brutal crime before.) Her character portraits are all filled with discredited psychological terms that also makes this feel very dated. Anybody looking for a psychological insight that are remotely interesting in 2016 should skip this.Many of the tales are pretty boring. There are some very interesting descriptions of investigations, but only in a few cases. Most of them seem to be of the "how could this person be such a heartless killer ???" variety, which strains credulity. Perhaps people really were that sheltered in the 70s when most of these crimes were committed, and the transcripts of what the victims and investigators said at the time make sense, but the matching narratorial tone does not.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

Yes, which is part of the problem. It's narrated by someone who sounds like an old woman, and it makes the entire production feel like something designed to titillate a woman in her 60s whose sensibilities never caught up with the new millennium.

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