Isobel Heathcote

Maybe it's the cold Norwegian climate, but I found this book dull and the performance so dry as to be seriously annoying. The narrator has a quirky delivery with odd pauses and rising inflections that detract from the story's emotional impact. The main character is a bad tempered misanthrope - very hard to warm up to. I know this is book 8 of a series, so perhaps earlier books were more compelling, but I found this one very disappointing.

No. For me, the book was spoiled by excessive length, overinflated dialogue, and a great many errors of grammar, emphasis and mispronunciation.

The ending was telegraphed from early on and did not come as a surprise.

Excellent voices and accents (sorry, that was four words).

No.

The book was tiresome in its length and while Mr. Ballerini's voices and accents were excellent, and easily distinguished one from another, the very large number of mispronounced words (even quite common words) was distracting and irritating.

These days I find myself a bit tired of vampires and gritty crime drama. The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart was a much needed departure from those genres - a fun, easy listen. The story was fun, but it was really the narrator who made it come to life for me, with his droll, urban voice. Highly recommended.

I'm a longtime fan of Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire series, and Hell is Empty was a good addition to that list. I was a little disappointed that most of my favorite recurring characters appear only briefly in this book, but it was still a good read. Great atmosphere, especially in the mountain scenes.

This is a terrific story with interesting characters and locations, but the choice of narrator entirely spoiled it for me. I eventually gave up well before the mid-point of the book. While the narrator does a good job of adult male voices with (various) regional accents, his inconsistent pronunciation of personal and location names, his odd pauses in the middle of sentences, and his flat, often monotonic narration, punctuated with sighs, made this an extremely irritating listen. I think I will buy the hard copy book.