Inspector French’s Greatest Case

By: Freeman Will Crofts

Narrated by: John Rayburn

A late-night murder of a diamond merchant’s veteran employee in London’s Hatton Gardens has Scotland Yard calling on Inspector French to investigate. When French gets there he finds not only the victim but missing diamonds and money from an open safe. There are meager clues as the Inspector follows a trail to mainland Europe and back. There are many false clues and several suspects with much of the searching leading to nothing but dead ends. We can listen as French sorts it all out, finding the missing diamonds and nabbing the murderer.

Public Domain (P)2023 John D. Rayburn

Terrible narrator, decent story

The story is a decent police procedural, slow moving, but with some twists. The narrator is beyond terrible. It’s disconcerting to have a British mystery read in a folksy American accent, but that’s not the worst. He reads in a nasal monotone with so little sense of what the words mean that I Googled him to see if this was read by AI. His only attempt to distinguish characters is to read the first few words from a new character in an even more nasal accent than usual, then slips back to the standard monotone. French, German, Irish, English, American characters sound exactly the same. The recording includes a couple of retakes that should have been deleted and a truly disturbing throat clearing hack. I only finished it so I could warn others!

Unlistenable

As others have commented, the narrator is horrible. Aside from his inability to make the story and its characters understood through use of his voice, he is very congested and spits into the microphone every fourth word. Just awful. I hope audible will rerecord this title with a different narrator. I only listened to enough of it to be allowed to rate it, and save you from this narrator.

Horrible narrator

Horrible narrator. Grating voice and hard to understand. I have read this book and many other Inspector French novels. Now I have been enjoying other books on the series again through audible. The other narrator is great but I just can’t listen to this one at all. Tried many times.