Every Dead Thing

I love Charlie Parker and all of his retinue but I had issues with the narrator! He mispronounced his butt off! He made so many mispronunciations, so often it really detracted from the overall experience.

I've read a few of the later CP novels and loved the blend of detectives + supernatural scary stuff! Mr. Harding's sterile, high school biology teacher's delivery of the material was only exacerbated by his weird pronunciations of mainstream locations and terms.

Maybe I'm being a pain in the *ss but there was so much of it I couldn't get away from it.

I look forward to future CP stories but not with this narrator!

I enjoy Louie and Angel. They are a gay couple who break all mainstream perceptions of male homosexual couples! They are total badasses! Louie is a scary dude and Angel is no slouch!

I've already whined about the narration.

Ummm no, not extreme.

I have always enjoyed the depth of the stories and the characters of the CP novels. The author strikes unexpected nails. He mentions the horrors of being a teenager thrown into a trunk and smelling the biological smells of those who preceded him in the trunk as they faced impending doom. His description of many of his characters leave me feeling a little creepy, somewhat uncomfortable... this is what I pay for in a story!

I adore John Connolly and all his Charlie Parker books. Jeff Harding, not so much.

Hum. Interesting question. Maybe Dennis Lehane's Kenzie &Gennaro series. I can't think of any other writer who marries mystery with supernatural undertones and makes the characters so flawed and yet still likable.

RAY PORTER. The other readers who have done this series either make Charlie sound too old or totally get Angel and Louis wrong.

Yes.

Please, Audio Gods, let me win the lottery so I can hire Ray Porter to read this entire series to me!

I actually enjoyed the book. It was classic Connolly, with maybe even a bit of Dave Robicheaux's South Louisiana tossed in, for good measure. Not great literature, but a much better than average detective novel.

The real problem was with the narrator. Yes, I know that he made no real attempt to add a serious Louisiana accent, and I can deal with that, since some accents are very tough to get right. Or, in the case of a Scottish accent, if you get it right, the narration is totally unintelligible. The problem is that there were 1/2 dozen words that he completely mispronounced. Since some of them were place names and not just N'Awleans, but when he mispronounces Metarie, Ponchartrain, etc. and they are words/place names that come up repeatedly, it's like fingernails on a chalk board. It should have been basic research to check on those names.

To call it warmed over James Lee Burke (the mysticism of the Bayou), Robert B. Parker (the relationship between the protagonist and his love interest and his relationship with violent criminal colleagues with a heart of gold) and Mickey Spillane (violence) would be a disservice to those writers. This was absolutely wretched. Predictable and boring. The only audio book that I hated more was The Gray Man by Mark Greaney. REALLY avoid that one. I have read (probably way too much) crime fiction. I love it. This book seemed like the author learned all of the cliches but none of what makes the best of crime fiction transcend the genre.

Even the action scenes were boring. I found my mind wandering as the bodies piled up. I fired off two quick shots from the blah blah blah... The tragedy that Parker faces at the beginning of the book doesn't seem to phase him. He tells us it does but nowhere does he show us that it does. The book is also predictable. If you have read 2 or more crime fiction novels in your life you will be way ahead of the plot.

It would be nice if the narrator learned how to properly pronounce words. His mispronunciations, especially of locations where the pronunciation can easily be discovered (my favorite was Ro-hee-buth for Rehoboth Beach, DE), are really distracting. The narrator seemed to have no interest in proper pronunciation. There were more mispronunciations from this reader than I have heard in all the other books I have listened to combined.

Sorry to say it did not.

Avoid this book! It is the first one for which I am going to seek a refund from Audible.