Sequestered with the Murderers

A Vett Brayborn Murder Mystery

De: Dr. Sandra Tanner

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

When Brightness Tours’ bus driver, Duffy Radley, fails to return to the bus after a rest stop at the Jefferson Springtop rest area on Interstate 81, the passengers are sequestered on the bus until he is found. The state police are called, and a massive hunt around the rest area ensues. He is located inside the locked maintenance room, murdered, and shot seven times in the chest. How did he get there? And why was he shot seven times; what’s the significance?

After the state police release the sequestered passengers, the director of bus services drives them to their drop-off place. Unlicensed private detective Vett Brayborn is one of the passengers. The next day she is contacted by the president of Brightness Tours, Jackson Stevens, and hired to find Duffy’s murderer before the police do. Why the rush? What is Brightness Tours hiding? Jackson tells Vett that the quicker she can get a handle on the murder and bring it to a conclusion, the faster he can quell any negative talk that would put Brightness in an unfavorable position.

Vett learns Duffy is associated with the ten-year-old Lacecap Hydrangea Murders, where an owner of a brothel, Ms. Lacecap, and her niece, Diantha, were murdered six months apart. Ms. Lacecap was stabbed to death. The homicide detectives think the incident was a robbery gone bad since her house was ransacked. The niece was found in the park; death was due to blunt force trauma to the back of her head. Duffy was married to Ms. Lacecap’s daughter, Sybil, and was arrested for both murderers because of his attempts to seduce Diantha and his association with known criminals. Because his case was based on circumstantial evidence, he was acquitted of all wrongdoing. However, Ms. Lacecap’s family and the community think he got away with murder. Did he? Did the community and family know something the police didn’t? Did they exact revenge?

Though Vett distrusts Jackson’s “mitigating damage to the company” reason for the rush to find Duffy’s murderer before the police, she plunges full speed ahead. She uncovers the powerful driving force behind Duffy’s execution-style murder and a long-ago secret behind the Lacecap Hydrangea Murders. This secret was ripe to be told.

A Good Mystery Ruined by many Virtual Voice Errors

I enjoyed Dr. Tanner's mystery. The characters are believable and interesting; interpersonal relationships are realistic; and the settings are enjoyable. The two murders are well conceived, and the detective's revelatory talent is novel - I don't believe I've read that talent previously, and I'm a voracious reader.

Unfortunately, I struggled to truly immerse myself in the story due to the far-too-numerous virtual voice errors. Having listened to a goodly number of books narrated by virtual voice, there is consistency in VV's inability to properly speak numbers like time, ages, addresses, and weapon caliber. For example, consistently saying point-two-two for a typically spoken twenty-two-caliber weapon, or one-thousand hours for 10-hundred hours or ten colon zero zero for 10:00. VV read the pronoun "I" as "ih" at the beginning of every sentence. VV's consistent and alternating mispronunciation of words or names is also annoying; the name s/l HAY-den also spoken as HIGH-den or Ythe v. With (Wythe) county; and the changing accent on syllables for the same word also make listening challenging. Poor grammar, such as pronouncing "read" as "reed" rather than "red" when past tense is indicated is another VV error.

Having Virtual Voice as a narrator may not affect those unfamiliar with proper English grammar and even local dialectic pronunciation, but for anyone aware of those errors, it certainly decreases that book/series' value.

Thankfully, this story was well-enough conceived and written that I was able to listen to its conclusion.