Diamonds Aren't Forever

Heist Ladies, Book 1

By: Connie Shelton

Narrated by: Kelly Willis

Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher's summary

A nearly flawless museum robbery, a missing million-dollar necklace, a stalled investigation. For the victim of the crime, the situation calls for desperate measures, and spunky 72-year-old Pen Fitzpatrick isn't going to sit by and do nothing. 

When the police have a dozen excuses why they can’t solve the crime, Pen does the only thing she can do - gather a group of friends to help catch the crooks and steal back the necklace. They call themselves The Heist Ladies. 

It becomes apparent the thief is a master con man who is likely working with an international theft ring. The chase takes the Ladies far from home and into elegant European enclaves as they attempt to face him down. Close calls and near misses - it’s never quite certain whether the women will be able to pull their own spectacular heist and see justice done.

©2019 Books in Motion (P)2019 Books in Motion

Critic reviews

Rated PG

Appalling narration

The story itself is cute, but hokey. The real story here is how bad the narration is. First of all, the voices and accents are awful. It’s really annoying to listen to those nasal voices. The worst part is the mispronunciations. There were so many and it was really distracting from the story. I know I’m just listening and not reading the actual words but I’m sure at one point someone was acting “cagey” in the story and the narrator pronounced it “keggy” and I lost count of how many times different characters pronounced Nice, France with a long I, as in “he’s a nice guy.” Characters who supposedly were in Europe buying tickets to Nice and then we’re in Nice, but still pronounced it the same way. There were others, too. I really can’t understand how the author let this pass for her work. Don’t audiobooks get edited or reviewed before publishing? I’m embarrassed for the author, the narrator and the publishing company. Shame on them all for putting this work out this way.

Good story and characters, laughably bad narration

I really liked the characters and their interactions. I enjoy the Mrs Pollifax books and I think that others who enjoy Mrs Pollifax and other strong, older, unassuming female leads who are wiser than they know will appreciate this book. The narrator took away from some of my enjoyment of the book. Lots of mispronunciations and terrible accents, some so bad it was laughable. If you can’t do an accent, just don’t do it. Also the one that I thought was a joke at first was the narrator pronouncing Nice, France as “nice” instead of “niece.” Didn’t anyone present during the recording process say anything?! I gave the book itself 5 stars because I really enjoyed it and it’s not the author’s fault that then narrator did a bad job.

Terrible narrator

I only say the narrator was bad because several of the words she pronounced were incorrect. she should really have checked the pronunciation of cities and places that she would be reading about. I like the story but the narrator just really distracted me.

Good story

The narrator has a fun tone but her pronunciation of various words is disappointing, especially since the words are pretty common - like Nice (pronounced "niece") in France. Good book overall

Awful

Quaint sounding heist genre with terrible voice characterizations by the narrator whose nice normal voice is what you hear on the sample. SO DISAPPOINTING