Audiobook Review Roundup

Listen For the Lie by Amy Tintera

Bless Your Heart by Lindy Ryan

Everytime I Go On Vacation Someone Dies by Catherine Mack 

With an opening line like "A podcaster decided to ruin my life, so I'm buying a chicken," I was prepared for the humor in this book. It is also a clever and thrilling mystery!

Five years ago, Lucy Chase was found wandering in the town of Plumpton, Texas, in clothes stained with the blood of her best friend, Savannah Harper. A head injury and amnesia left Lucy unable to recall any details of what happened. Sympathy quickly turns to suspicion in the small town, even though Lucy has never been charged. She moves to LA to escape the scrutiny. 

When Ben Owens decides to do a podcast looking into Savannah's murder, Lucy's anonymity disappears and she is reluctantly convinced by her grandmother, Beverly, to return to Plumpton. 

The story is told alternately through Lucy and through episodes of the podcast. Lucy is both eager and reluctant to recover her memory, but mostly she just wants to know what happened to Savvy. The podcast and fragments of Lucy's lost memory reveal new information that shines suspicion on several people. It also reveals that there was more to both Lucy and Savannah than met the eye. 

Tintera draws you in with a clever mystery that twists back and forth in a way that has you wanting to find out more. It is also filled with literal laugh-out-loud humor, particularly from Lucy's grandmother Beverly. (If Amy Tintera and Janet Evanovich ever want to team up and write a story starring Lucy's Grandma Beverly and Stephanie Plum's Grandma Mazur I will ride or die with the two of them!)

The audiobook is narrated by January LaVoy and Will Damron and they both kill it! Weaving the seriousness of the story punctuated with humor can pose challenges but these two nailed it. Great pacing and distinctive character voices really enhance the story. This is one of the best books I've read this year.

I was provided a copy of this audiobook by the publisher.

Staying in Texas, three generations of Evans women (Ducey, daughter Lenore, granddaughter Grace) run the local (and only) funeral parlor. When a local woman shows up on their slab and rises from the dead, they react not with the horror you would expect, but with a mixture of concern and resignation. The Evans women have been the first line of defense against the strigori. If this isn't an isolated incident, it may be time to let Grace's teenage daughter Luna in on the real family business.

As the deaths pile up and more bodies appear (or disappear) it seems they have a real problem on their hands and some secrets they thought buried, may not have stayed buried.

This is interesting, almost light-hearted horror. An inquisitive deputy sheriff who has a history with the Evans but doesn't know as much as he thought about them offers an outsider's view of the events which is important to ground the story. A cantankerous old sheriff who also has a history with them sheds his own kind of insight on the story. 

With each death, the crisis becomes a little more critical. Ryan interjects some history of the Evans family as well as the strigori. This history interrupts the flow of the story and doesn't always inform you as much as you would hope. Some of the character's actions seem illogical, or at least slow given the seriousness of the situation. Still, it's a fun story with a generous amount of blood and some engaging characters. 

The audiobook is narrated by Stephanie Nemeth-Parker who does a good job making the character voices distinctive. She also makes the dialogue fit the time and place of the story.

I was provided a copy of this audiobook by the publisher.

Eleanor Dash is traveling Italy in honor of the book series that was launched after a vacation there several years earlier. Her publishing company is sponsoring the trip which includes several fellow authors and a group of lucky fans of Eleanor's series. One of the people on the trip is Connor, the man she fell in love with on that initial trip and who starred as a character in the book that resulted from it. Even though Eleanor no longer loves Connor, her readers do. That and a bit of blackmail on Connor's part keep him in the picture.

Harper Dash is Eleanor's sister, personal assistant, and usually her memory. Harper always has the details and itinerary that Eleanor either forgot or never bothered to learn. When Connor confides that he thinks someone is trying to kill him, Eleanor doesn't believe him. Furthermore, she begins thinking about how she can kill him off in her next book and finally be free of him. 

After a series of near-misses for Connor and Eleanor which may or may not have been murder attempts, someone actually dies. The trip includes Connor's ex-wife (who was Connor's wife when he met Eleanor, unbeknownst to her), Eleanor's rebound boyfriend Oliver, now also an ex, and other authors with various motives to dislike or distrust Connor. There is no shortage of suspects. Eleanor's reasoning and investigation point to one suspect after another (perhaps further evidence of why she's an author and not a detective) before we finally discover the culprit. 

This is a fun little cozy mystery with a lot of fourth-wall breaking, through innumerable footnotes. Eleanor is a mostly likable character, particularly redeemed by her relationship with her sister Harper. Listening to it on audio, the footnotes were maybe the funniest part of the book and didn't interrupt the flow at all. Reading it either digitally or in print I think would have been exceptionally frustrating. 

Elizabeth Evans is the narrator who did a wonderful job with the voices, and particularly the accents which helped cement the location. Her pacing kept the story flowing and she was particularly adept at incorporating the footnotes and elevating the humor.

I was provided a copy of this book by the publisher.