A very good listen

Our friend JoAnn is so good with audiobooks, appreciating the unique talents of different narrators and enjoying read/listen combinations. As much as I love them, I tend listen to audiobooks without those nuances, but there were ways in which the one I just finished brought home the unique pleasures of reading this way.

I Let You Go is in itself a well-written and suspenseful novel.  The book opens with a hit-and-run accident, and goes on to trace what happens next to Jenna Grey, a young woman mourning the death of her child, and the Bristol police detectives investigating the crime. As the book moved back and forth between these two parallel stories, the recording used two narrators -- a woman, Nicola Barber, to read the chapters about Jenna, and a man, Steven Crossley, to read the chapters told from the point of view of Inspector Roy Stevens and the ones about Ian Peterson, a businessman teaching at the college where Jenna is an art student.  That in itself was a great way to empasize the rhythm among the two story lines, and both narrators were very good.  But the reading {especially the woman's} also underscored the twists in the plot in a way that might not have been there on the printed page, and that was the best part of listening.

I won't say more.  It's not perfect {the end piles up a little}, but if you're looking for a good mystery, or a very good audiobook, I can recommend this one!. :)


I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh
Penguin Audio, 2016
Source:  Minuteman Library Network