R. Thyme

Lots of Talk, Not Much Action, Great Narration

Revisado: 07-08-20

Anna Bentinck's superb talent is wasted on this one. Kate Saunders indulges in lengthy, boring, Psych 101 blah blah blah that causes the annoying necessity to use the fast forward button throughout. The identity of the murderer is obvious from almost the first introduction of the character. Laetitia Rodd is a drip. All the other characters are equally flat, with the exception of Laetitia's brother, who is given at least a bit of personality, which is sadly underdeveloped. Altogether not worth your time, even given the delightful pleasure of listening to Anna Bentinck's lovely voice, spot-on dramatic intonation, and captivating variety of regional and individual accents and pronunciations.

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Better Than Book 1 In This Series

Revisado: 02-11-20

The Audible tag name for a three star rating is "Pretty Good" which pretty much sums up this installment in the Willows and Lane series.

Ms. Meire's voice is pleasant, and her voice acting is well-paced and nuanced. I've given a three star rating for performance because she creates little variation among the speaking voices for the various characters, thereby making it difficult to know who's talking until the speaker says enough that the content identifies the person.

"One-Way Tickets" is better than the first book ("Lane") in part because the gosh awful Willows character appears only briefly at the beginning of the novel and then in only a few, short conversations thereafter. Mrs. Willows is beyond annoying. Shallow, whining, nagging, priggish, prying and willfully ignorant, with as much common sense as the YouTube dolts who eat laundry detergent pods.

The plotting is also better here, with sufficient novelty to retain the reader's attention, though the resolution of each set piece is obvious, as in the first book. It's a fairly short book, so the good guys and the bad guys are fairly standard, perhaps even a bit cardboard. Irascible Scot. Trash talking thugs. Etc. (No spoilers.) Mr. Grainger's books are roughly 50% action and 50% psychological disquisition. If you dislike lengthy discussions of how characters feel and why they feel the way they do, then Mr. Grainger's books are probably not for you.

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Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Revisado: 12-15-19

Heathcliff Lennox gives stupid a bad name. He's not a silly-funny bumbler like Bertie Wooster sans Redemption by Jeeves. He's waaay beyond even Simpsons stupid. Sam Dewhurst-Phillips is a brilliant narrator, but WATCH OUT. While you are listening to Murder at Melrose Court, your IQ is dropping one point per sentence.

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Stupid Is As Stupid Does

Revisado: 12-15-19

Heathcliff Lennox gives stupid a bad name. He's not a silly-funny bumbler like Bertie Wooster sans Redemption by Jeeves. He's waaay beyond even Simpsons stupid. Sam Dewhurst-Phillips is a brilliant narrator, but WATCH OUT. While you are listening to Murder at Melrose Court, your IQ is dropping one point per sentence.

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Much of a Muchness

Revisado: 10-30-19

These short stories lack Crispin's witty send-ups of English archetypes, and the same-old-same-old-nesses of the plots and characters get progressively more tiresome with each succeeding story. Crispin is "boring for England" hereabouts. The delight of hearing Philip Bird's superb narration is the only reason to keep listening.

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Can't Be the Same Author Named James Anderson

Revisado: 10-16-19

James Anderson's "The Affair of the Bloodstained Egg Cosy" (correct spelling) is a pleasant English cozy mystery with a few laughs and an entertaining cast. The novel drags from time to time with too much yakkity-yak and way too much description of inessentials, but Cornelius Garrett's unfailingly brilliant narration wins through, though thoughts do tend to drift off during the tedious passages.

"The Affair of the Mutilated Mink" can't possibly have been written by the same author. It is tedium from the first paragraph. But much, much worse, it is populated with an array of the most unpleasant characters you would ever want to avoid meeting. Even the innocuous characters from "Egg Cosy" have been rewritten as thoroughly disagreeable nags. Every character (even the butler) whines and cavils and argues and childishly blusters and shouts insults and irritates and irritates and irritates and irritates and irritates and irritates. See what I mean? Cornelius Garrett's narration is still unfailingly brilliant, but even his narration cannot make tolerable the affront of this crushingly tiresome assault on the English cozy mystery tradition.

The boring, boring yakkity-yak and interminable descriptions of utterly uninteresting places and actions never stop. Everyone argues and complains non-stop. Every so often, another unpleasant character appears. There is no humor, no grace, no plot, nothing worth your time or dollars.

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From A to V - Annoying to Vile

Revisado: 04-26-19

Want to spend 7-and-a-half hours listening to the spewings of the gratingly annoying and the loathsomely vile? Why then, "Black & Blue" is for you. After the first book, which had promise, the series has steadily broken that promise into less and less palatable portrayals of, ultimately, indigestible characters.

The title characters, especially Kate, have become dithering, self-absorbed, unconvincing caricatures. So much so that the otherwise excellent narrator has resorted to whispering almost all of Tony's mush mouth blather, while screeching almost all of Kate's never ending whining. The most repugnant of the secondary characters are front and center, and the formerly tolerable secondary characters throw neurotic temper tantrums.

Then there are the characters developed specially for this murder non-mystery. The love-interest Texan who personifies the All Hat No Cattle trope. Every one of the female characters is a hollow, grasping, deceitful, clinging shrew straight out of the Misogynist Hall of Horrors. The male characters are cardboard cutouts who are supposed to be Worst Cases of Testosterone Poisoning. The murder non-mystery is a thin subplot. The book really should be re-titled "The Anguish That Lord & Lady Hetheridge Suffer at Home and At Work" to do it justice.

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Plodding, Implausible, and It's a Children's Book

Revisado: 11-26-17

A boring book for children, with plot holes big enough to swallow a fleet of lorries. It starts with a preposterous act of petulant vandalism and goes down hill from there. The cardboard cutout characters are, well, cardboard thin and cardboard tasty. The 14-year-old protagonist's parents and adult guardian are dead, of course, and the living adult characters are the weak, mean, ugly ogres that maladjusted 14-year-olds believe all adults to be. The story line is so glaringly obvious that I felt like grabbing sunglasses even while listening. The book is classified as a mystery. The only mysteries are how such sodden, small-minded, depressing awfulness could come from the high talent pen of Anthony Horowitz, and why the brilliant Simon Prebble wasted his breath on such rubbish.

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Whining All the Way

Revisado: 09-04-17

Any additional comments?

The Royal Spyness series ran out of even a modicum of appeal about halfway to this dismal, depressing addition. I kept hoping and listening, but now I'm done. The limp protagonist, Lady Georgiana, is a lame, whiny, self-pitying, lazy dimwit who has become quite insufferable. My hope sprang not-entirely-eternal that she would grow up. Sadly, Lady Georgiana only shriveled and regressed, dragged down by her clinging dependence and fatuous inanity as the series plodded on.

Not that Lady Georgiana is alone in her unpleasantness. Not at all. There is not one likeable, let alone admirable, character in the entire series. From the sickeningly feeble Duke-brother to the despicable sister-in-law to the conniving Queen to the sappy, patronizing boyfriend to the narcissist mother to the noxious, baneful maid, all of the Royal Spyness characters aren't so much to be found in a rogues gallery as in Sartre's No Exit. Unlike Joseph Garcin, however, I have finally had enough, and I'm leaving l'enfer.

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Winner of Most Annoying Protagonist Ever

Revisado: 04-30-16

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The continuing travails of Hilary Manningham-Butler, the most annoying protagonist ever. Though this book is self-contained, and it's not necessary to read the first book first, Hilary's character is slightly less annoying if you know why he's (she's) suffering the inconveniences set upon him (her) in this installment. (The first book is much better constructed too.) Experienced mystery readers will rumble the villain smartish, and some players in the drama are cardboard stereotypes, but I did keep listening to the end, primarily because of Angela Dawe's top drawer performance. Emotional import, pace, accents, timbre, pitch, etc, etc; here is excellence in audio book performance. The plot of The Red Zeppelin is thin, and motivations are vague or unexplained or obvious. The final jeopardy scene is so implausible that it must be a not-funny joke on the reader. But really, listen yourself to decide if you've ever met a more annoying protagonist.

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