Julie

I've been a Stones fan forever, but I'm not sure I'll be able to enjoy their music after listening to the first two installments of this book. (I don't plan to ever listen to the third.) Richards' misogyny is all the worse because he is either unaware of it or utterly unapologetic for it. Women are either b*tches, chicks or birds and seem to exist only to be f***ed by Richards. Even if I could ignore his treatment of women, I doubt that I would finish the book - it is very badly written.

I'm not sure why Johnny Depp narrates the beginning and Joe Hurley the rest. It seems bizarre.

I have enjoyed all of the Inspector Banks books and find it hard to believe this is written by the author of that series.

The plot is less than compelling and entirely predictable. And, why oh why do we have to know what every character orders every time they eat at a pub or restaurant? Not only are we told the name of a wine they drink, we also learn that it tastes of currents with an undertone of tobacco. When the protagonist shops for CD's in South Africa, we are given a list of all of his purchases. Each course of every meal eaten at home is also detailed. All of this information does nothing to advance the plot or to give us a deeper understanding of the characters.

Although I've never read a romance novel, I suspect that the love scenes in this book are better suited to a book from that genre. Here, they are just icky.

I just hope it's better than the last two I've listened to.

I'll never listen to a Toby Lennet Moore narration again. The story is told from a first-person perspective, and his voicing of the protagonist only makes him more annoying.

Severe disappointment.

I would pay to listen to Jim Dale read the phone book.

Oh, and the book is great, too.

So maybe not every reader will be an attorney and a quilter and will cringe at how poorly the author understands the construction and execution of both a criminal defense and a quilt, but any reader can appreciate how badly this novel is written. Her thouroughly unlikable characters are consistent in being completely inconsistent. Why would a seemingly strong, smart and independent woman realize the love of her life is a man who becomes angry with her when she refuses to sleep with him, after he becomes sexually aroused, because she has left him with, and I quote, "blue balls"? This same man tries to order her not to continue with a trial when she doesn't feel well when she is a few weeks pregnant with his child. Just the kind of guy every intelligent and self-reliant woman wants.

It was torture to listen to this all the way to the end, but I was hoping the author would somewhat redeem herself with a suprising yet logical solution to the book's mystery. Sadly, she did not. I have dozens of audiobooks on my hard drive; this is the first one I've permanently deleted.