Samyann
Written by Karen Rose, narrated by Marguerite Gavin, an unabridged audiobook almost seventeen hours long.
This is a police procedural, a who-is-the-bad-guy mystery. The lead character is a medical examiner who is being stalked/harassed, i.e., she finds a dead body while on her morning run. Shortly, we learn that someone meant for her to find the corpse. A human heart is left in her car, another dead body is found in the lot of her club, that sort of stuff.
A transparent romance ensues – no surprise there – like Sandra Brown, et al, Karen Rose is a talented mystery writer who succumbs to ’sex-sells’ and feels it necessary to augment a great mystery with gratuitous and mawkish sex scenes that are a distraction to fast-forward through. From the very beginning of the story, the two characters have internally orgasmic thoughts about each other as they force polite correctness, phony type-a-boy-gets-fluttering-eyelash arguments, and have mucho weak knees and optical intercourse. Get the picture? Another great mystery or contrived romance, you be the judge.
With regard to the audiobook reading, I hate dissing narrators. But … Marguerite Gavin narration is unnatural, distracting. Enunciation is forced, words sounding slurred on occasion, lisped, as if spoken by someone who has had one too many. Male voices are all snarls and growls and the lead female voice is whiny and vulnerable sounding – especially wimpy when ever the drop-dead handsome investigative cop is present. That said, you’ll have no trouble discerning who-says-what-to-who.
I really like getting lost in this type of who-done-it, but I’ll be more cautious when it comes to selecting another Karen Rose-Marguerite Gavin collaboration.
A good mystery that could have been much shorter with elimination of some nonsensical come-hither crap, presented with questionable narration. But, you may think it’s just peachy – there are many good reviews, and many that nix it completely – so, I’m not alone. There’s that.
