2nd Chance: The Women's Murder Club

If this was a decent novel to begin with, the narration ensured that I would ever know. The whiny voice, exaggerated diction and overemphasis without relevance to the action distracted from the text and made listening a painful process, like a finger nail on a chalkboard.

If this was a stand alone story or the first in a series it would be a much better story, but the fact that Mr. Patterson forgets so much of the history of the first book detracts from the main character, Lindsay Boxer. While the story itself is solid and has its twists, as it should, like any good story, I find that I was disappointed with the characters more and more as the story went on. Characters that are supposed to the the brightest in the city are missing glaring clues and not doing simple things to catch the bad guy. Now I realize that some of these simple things would make a "bad read", so I do not hold that against Mr. Patterson, but ,without revealing a "spoiler", no one picked up on Lindsay's savior (By the time you get to it, you'll already figure it out!).

If I could have given this story a three and a half, I would have, but since I have enjoyed other pieces of Mr. Patterson's work before, I decided to give him a "true 2nd Chance." The first book in the series I really enjoyed, this book is a mild let down, hopefully a third book in the series will be forthcoming to see if this will be a series that I will continue enjoy.

I have to agree with the mediocre reviews of this book BUT I still enjoyed it.

Patterson's "airplane book" style writing is particularly appropriate for an audio book. There aren't a lot of characters to keep track of and the plot jumps along quickly. You could do worse, that's for sure.

It was good enough I'm going to use my BasicListener credit on 3rd Degree.

The only way I could get thru the melodramatic narration was to imagine this as a take-off from Saturday Night Live on a detective show - reminded me of that bad acting by William Shatner on his detective show - people (and I hope cops) just don't talk this way. But if you think of it as a spoof - it is quite funny.

Even more than the previous volume of the series, 1st to Die, I found 2nd Chance an intriguing story brought to its knees by narration so amateur and ill-dramatized as to be very unpleasant listening. I finally forced myself to listen to the last twenty minutes to hear the ending.

Why don't producers of audio books make the narrators audition before signing contracts? I agree with the reviewer who said it was the worst narration ever. If the producers of these books aren't familiar with the work of narrators like Barbara Rosenblatt and Jim Dale, they should not be in the business. I hate wasting my money on books that could be better narrated by a third grader. The story is OK but not as good as the first. It would have been more enjoyable if there had been some decent narration. Is this woman really an actress? Did she listen to her own narration? It boggles the mind.

I think James was drunk when he wrote this book. The story is good but it's terribly written and read. The narrator cannot make up her mind whether she is reading a poetry book or a murder mystery. "1st to Die" was pretty good though.

This was the worst narration of any audio book I have tried to date! I couldn't get past the first 4 chapters. Sorry, Melissa, you should stick to acting.

Very bad narration. Every word is over-annunciated and over-acted. It was torture listening to this...

This book was not near as good as First to die and the lady who read it was not as good either. I'm going to give the 3rd book a try and see how good it is.