The Practice of Deceit

from work to keep listening to this treasure. The prose is rich, the characters complex and the narrator perfect!! I dread the ending of this book. I hope Audible attains more material from this gifted author!!

I've listened to a lot of stories in the past few years, and this one stands out as one of the best. You are pulled in quickly and you want to stay with it. One of those where you feel a little sad when it ends.

This book is beautifully written. It builds gradually to a nightmare scenario - but never with blunt instruments or gratuitous thrills. The way the story is told in the first person keeps the action very close. I don't think it's easy to tell stories in the first person unless the writer is very skilled and economical in their prose. This book held me rapt for the whole of the telling. Luckily I was on a long car ride for most of it. The narrator is first rate. I remember him from Stegner's Crossing to Safety. His phrasing is terrific, and he inspires real connection with the protagonist.

Loved the language, the narrator, the story and the characters. I am going to listen to this book once again, I loved it so much!

The plot unfolded very quickly and from then on it raced, somewhat breathlessly, to an ending so unsatisfying, so suddenly out of nowhere, that I actually went back to Audible.com to see if I'd missed the 3rd part. But no, that was it. The characters were so badly drawn, that I really didn't care about anyone in it. The "psychotic" wife who mislead everyone with whom she came in contact had a sad childhood and was abandoned by her father (we're told in a wikipedia-type paragraph or two). But the psycho-analyst husband, who didn't recognize this in his wife, was such a simpering, vapid, not too sharp guy, that I wasn't really keen on his kids (whose names you couldn't keep track of because they actually appeared perhaps a handful of times doing nothing particularly interesting or revealing) going to either of them. They would probably be better off staying with their nannie, the only one with any sense in the book.

Perhaps it's because I just finished In The Woods by Tana French. Elizabeth George, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Jodi Picoult, AS Byatt, Barbara Kingsolver, Alice Hoffman, Diane Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale are a few of the extraordinary women writers I've read/listened to. Unfortunately Elizabeth Benedict, at least in this book, revealed little of their magic.

I'm 1 hour in and I hope it gets better. It seems to be chick lit of the male kind or a detective-type descriptive, first-person narrative.