El Narco: The Bloody Rise of Mexican Drug Cartels

Is there an award like the Razzie for worst audio performance? Maybe a Nails-On-Blackboard award? A NOBY? If so I would like to nominate Mr. Paul Thornley’s performance in this book.

Although he is a professionally trained actor, I can honestly say I’ve heard more vocal variation and feeling from a prerecorded message than he delivers here.
This book may contain the secrets of the universe but I’ll never know --- it was too painful a listen.

One thing that puzzles me. From the time the narration is complete to the time the book is purchased, how many people listen to it for quality? Three? One? None? None would be my guess for this book because no hearing person could listen to it and say “Yep, this one is good to go”

If I were the author and had spent months researching, writing and re-writing a book that actually made it to publishing and THEN had it swept under the rug by dreadful narration, I’d be more than upset.

Interesting, engaging and well-documented history of Mexican narco-trafficking.

I tried hard to overlook the narration, but it was so distracting that I have to say it ruined the experience, and I gave up. The narrator read a journalistic, non-fiction work as if it were a novel, with a breathless, dramatic voice entirely inappropriate to the genre. To make matters worse, he pronounces many of the Mexican place names and words with a Castillian accent (pronouncing "c" as "th"), then, inexplicably, completely mispronounces some of the most important Mexican Spanish words, even by Castillian standards ("Gualalupe" as "gwadaloop"). I hope this book is recorded by a different narrator so I can try it again.

It is a good history

Not if he read the same way. He finishes every sentence at a whisper. You can have the volume uncomfortably loud so you can hear the whole sentence, or strain to hear the end of the sentence at normal volume.

This is the book I was looking for when I bought "Murder City" and was disappointed with the lack of factual information.
Just this morning the news reported four reporters have been killed by the Zeta cartel in the last week. This book informs the reader about, what, where, and why, to an amazing degree of detail on this frightening and very current state of chaos south of our border. It is tragic and building up into a huge mess that will affect us all sooner or later.
I found it well written, well read and very interesting.
I highly recommend it.

I never knew all this went on.

There wasn't any one main character in this particular book.

The narrator could have added some inflection to his reading and I think his pauses were a little bit too long.

No.

Top ten

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain because of the frankness about both the situation, and probably cause I had just listened to that as well right after.

The first 3 chapters

The last chapter

The research done by Grillo

Every chapter with statistics is interesting

The English accent

Not really, the analysis of the read must be done on downtimes to completely grasp the author messag