Samyann
All Night Long has been in my Audible.com library since September of 2009. Thought I’d better get around to listening. The story is read by Kathy Garver and David Colacci. Neither reader controls the narration of the story, it’s shared and unpredictable. Colacci is okay. Garver sounds like a teenaged girl, high pitched, nail-on-a-blackboard, annoying. Mixing is terrible, virtually non-existent, volume rises and falls, unnecessary pauses. I’m not certain how early All Night Long is in the writing career of Krentz, Hoping it is very early, because the characters are sophomoric and silly.
The mystery is passable. A young woman returns to her home town in answer to an email summons by a childhood friend and suspects it is related to the death of her parents years ago. But, the behavior of the characters is forced and childish. Unnecessary character reactions and dialogue is truly infantile, eye-rolling material. A fundamental premise in All Night Long is the love story between the two lead characters. Krentz created a transparent and ridiculous character in Luke, a motel owner. Krentz actually tells the reader more than once that Luke is an “alpha” male. Apparently, she hadn’t gotten around to writing lessons about showing rather than telling. That which she does show about Luke is not a man in love, but a creepy stalker. The female lead, Irene, behaves like a moon-eyed valley girl who ‘lifts her lashes’. Luke views ‘feminine disappointment’ in her eyes. What the hell…? Yikes. You probably won’t find this in audiobook easily, since it’s no longer available on the Audible site. No surprise. If you do run across it somewhere, take a pass.
