The Carthaginian Crisis

De: Gorg Huff, Paula Goodlett

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Antigonus One-eye has murdered Susan Godlewski. He did it on camera as a political statement of dominance. The Ship People, the people from the twenty-first century who had arrived in this time on the Cruise ship Queen of the Sea, had to respond. Or they would be the meat for any bandit chief from the tag end of the fourth century BCE.
Captain Lars Floden declared Antigonus One-eye dead, but despite the magical beliefs of this time, just saying it didn't make it so. Making it so would demand courage, and commitment, misdirection, and impossible technology from the twenty-first century. As well as time and more than a little luck.
In the meantime, Ptolemy has decided that he wants more than Egypt. He wants Sicily and its highly productive farms. If Carthage wants to argue the point, well he'll take Carthage too.
Carthage is in a panic. It can't abandon its allies on Sicily. To do so would be to destroy its trading empire. They have a strong and capable navy. Better now that they have been able to buy steam engines from the ship people. However their army is mostly mercenaries. Mercenaries who wont stand up to Ptolemy.
Ptolemy doesn't need control of the Mediterranean to conquer Carthage. He can march an army along the north coast of Africa. Carthage needs allies, and fear of what Ptolemy might do to them is forcing them to consider the brand new Pax Romana.

This is the fourth book in the Queen of the Sea series. "The Alexander Inheritance" and "The Macedonian Hazard" were published by Baen, "The Sicilian Coil" which discussed what was happening in Western Europe, while "The Macedonian Hazard" was dealing with Eastern Europe, was published by Ring of Fire Press. Then after Ring of Fire Press folded self-published by Paula and I on Amazon. This book "The Carthaginian Crisis" continues the universe almost from the moment of the end of "The Sicilian Coil" and combines the two narratives while adding other threads.

This is the next book in the Queen of the Sea series but not the last. Like the 1632 series The Queen of the Sea is an open ended series with lots of room to grow.

This virtual voice is rather grating.

The story is a good continuation but ai isn’t getting the nuance through to the listener. Hire real voice actors.

Good story, horrific narrator.

I wrote down at least five different pronunciations of different character names. Dude, if reading isn't your thing, find another job. It makes the story hard to follow some times.

AI Can't Narrate!

I enjoyed the original text version of The Carthaginian Crisis very much. This Virtual Voice version is just terrible. The AI trying to read the book doesn't know how to pronounce the names of people from two thousand years ago, and it can't even settle on a one way to do so. The way a name is pronounced will change from one instance to the next, and they're all usually wrong. This is the second Virtual Voice book I've listened to. The first one wasn't very good either, but most of the names in it were fairly common. It also doesn't understand the difference between 1632 and one thousand, six hundred and forty-two. Maybe in a few years, this technology will be useful for making audio books of novels that might not otherwise get one, but that day hasn't arrived yet.