Murder in Vancouver: A Northwest Cozy Mystery

Northwest Cozy Mystery Series, Book 13

By: Dianne Harman

Narrated by: Charlie Glaize

Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's Summary

A famous fashion designer 

A poisoned box of chocolates 

A stolen painting 

Al, the Mafia man, is back on the job.   

Milton Arrowsmith is murdered by a poisoned box of chocolates on the morning of an art fundraiser, and a valuable painting is stolen from his apartment.  

His friends hire Al, both for their own security, and to find out what happened to Milton. Al investigates their social circle, and finds out everyone has secrets, some even connected to the case. It turns out the killer is much closer to home than anyone could have imagined.... 

Plenty of great food and two adorable dogs in this cozy mystery by a USA Today best-selling author and Amazon all-star. This is the 13th book in the Northwest Cozy Mystery Series.

©2020 Dianne Harman (P)2020 Dianne Harman

An interesting cozy mystery with murder, stolen art, and dogs

Murder in Vancouver is an interesting cozy mystery with a tough ex mob detective who gets hired to investigate a murder and a stolen painting. The story has a fun cast of characters and some spoiled, sweet dogs.

The narrator of the book does a good job. He is a bit gruff which fits the lead character well, but perhaps not as good for some of the other characters.

I received a complimentary copy of this audiobook. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Audio effects make this book unlistenable

I'm a Music Technologist, and I have a PhD in that subject area. And so I know about audio (including the spoken word), and I know about production (the process of making a recording sound professional). When I started listening to this book, I thought that the idea and story wasn't bad. I'm a Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. I love the city, and since I couldn't travel there (due to lockdown under the pandemic) I could at least travel there in my mind.

Unfortunately there is one big thing which stops me listening to this audio book, and that's the awful effects which are added to the narrator's voice. When one character is thinking, a terrible reverberation is added to the voice which makes the narration almost unintelligable. It is really jarring, as are some of the other effects.

Also, it's obvious where the edits are, i.e. where the narrator has gone wrong and has had to record another take. The takes are joined together in a really bad way. The tone in voice suddenly changes, indicating a dramatic change in distance from the microphone, often midway in sentence.

The book needs to be re-recorded with just voice, no weird effects. The narrator needs to tone down the weird accents and voices associated with each character, and just concentrate on the story itself.

I've given the overall rating as 2 stars and story as 2 stars because, what I heard of the book before I couldn't listen any more, had promise.

So ... bad narration, bad recording, bad production. I couldn't finish this book.