A Pint of Murder: Madoc & Janet Rhys, Book 1

* very cozy formula: village murder with RCMP inspector teamed with local amateur sleuth on both an investigation and blossoming romance. You can guess easily who the killer is, but that's not the point of the listen! --more of a traditional village cozy than whodunit
* captures the rural anglophone New Brunswick setting well -- although an outsider, I lived there around that period (1980s) and I "recognized' the characters and voice
*good, gentle humour; decent writing, especially the dialogue
* Dufris hits the right notes with all the characters - no over-the-top Canucks, but there is some regional inflection respectfully attempted
*another gift from the publishing world of e- and audiobooks - I hadn't come across MacLeod/Craig before. I look forward to more of her audiobooks. This first of a series has me hooked.

This is a great cozy mystery written in Charlotte MacLeod's gently humerous way. She wrote around three dozen intelligent, funny, carefully crafted mystery novels in her lifetime, in more than one series, and some stand-alones. I have been hoping for years that Audible would get some of them, and they finally have one. I enjoyed it immensely, and I really hope that the rest of this series (Madoc & Janet Rhys series) will be recorded & be made available on Audible, too. William Dufris did a great job as reader!

And please, Audible, try to acquire Charlotte MacLeod's "Sarah Kelling & Max Bittersohn" series. It was recorded by Books On Tape, and read by Mary Peiffer. (I requested them a few years ago, but no luck so far.)

If a book is to be performed rather than read, it's essential to choose a narrator whose voice sounds something like that of the main character. In most cases, the narrator should be the same gender as the protagonist. Mr. Dufris is unable to make Janet sound anything like an sweet young woman. He does better with the male characters.

I have read this book before, so I knew what to expect: a good story, a cozy atmosphere, reasonably gore-free murders, good characters. It's not remotely suspenseful, it's essentially good macaroni and cheese for those days when you yearn for just that. Charlotte MacLeod is always gently funny; this series is set in Canada, in a small community that seems real but not realistic. Other series are different. Her "Grub and Stakers" series is practically slapstick, sometimes silly; her Sarah Kelling series starts darker and gets progressively lighter; the Balaclava series is kind of a mixture of all. This series, with Janet and Madoc, is like those Balaclava ones.

The reader is okay; I would have preferred a woman's voice, given a female protagonist, but he's pretty good, and his pronunciation is fine.

I was looking for something light and diverting and this fit the bill perfectly. It has a kind of whispy innocence to it.

No great surprises in it, but just enough twist so you don't feel cheated.

Maybe. If I'm looking for something extra-lite to listen to.

Possibly a woman. This narrator left me wincing a little with female voices.

Well, depends on what you're looking for. It was not written to be deep (or I assume/hope not.) If you just want something uncomplicated, light, that requires little effort to listen to, this would be it.

Clever series introducing a Royal Canadian Mountie as the detective. The people were the sort of two-dimensional characters that tend to inhabit cozy mysteries. Well-developed, as far as they go, but you always pretty well know the good guys from the baddies :-) I have nothing really negative to say about this. A fairly predictable, lightly humorous mystery, that you could listen to easily while doing other things.