Treasure of Saint-Lazare

By: John Pearce

Narrated by: Tim Campbell

Length: 8 hrs and 35 mins

Publisher's summary

An old lover brings a cryptic letter to Paris, pulling Eddie Grant reluctantly into a treacherous web of intrigue and death - but giving him a slim chance to find the terrorists who murdered his family seven years before.

It launches him on a dangerous quest through Paris and the Loire Valley for the most valuable piece of Nazi loot that remains missing, a famous Raphael self-portrait from the early 16th century, along with the crates of Nazi bullion that accompanied it - all intended to finance the Fourth Reich.

Jen Wetzmuller, daughter of his father's World War II colleague in Army Intelligence, arrives in Paris, bearing a letter she found after her father was run down by a car on the streets of Sarasota. Its clues take Eddie from his Paris home to Florida, where he works to solve the mystery, barely escaping with his life. Then it's back home to burrow into the darkest reaches of the German occupation in search of the treasure.

Along the way he and Jen restart the brief, fiercely passionate affair that he abandoned, to his regret, 20 years before Sarasota. Most of all, Treasure of Saint-Lazare is a novel about Paris. (Treasure of Saint-Lazare is based on fact, the theft in 1939 of the priceless Raphael painting Portrait of a Young Man which disappeared in 1945.)

©2012 John M Pearce (P)2013 John M Pearce

robotic performance

Story was ok buy the voice sounded computer generated. Hard to get over the narration component.

Average story? Unpleasant narration

The book might have been better than average, but the narration was so bad it’s hard to be certain—it detracted an immeasurable amount from my enjoyment of the production. I can’t tell if it’s the reader or the director/producer but if they were aiming for gritty they landed on awkwardly mechanical. If there wasn’t a named narrator, I would guess they used a computer as the narrator. I might give the next book in the series a try, but just read it myself.

Run of the mill male centered mystery

I suppose if mysteries are your thing you might like this more than I did. I myself felt the story was pretty prosaic. Male lead of course gets every girl who even looks at him. Story is based on the Monument's men, the guys who tried to save art from the Nazi's and then spend a lot of time after the war trying to find what had been stolen... MOST of it from Jewish collectors, but some of it from museums. It must be remembered that Hitler was first and foremost a failed artist, so getting the art was a priority for him. What RUINES what was a ho-hum story anyway is the narrator of this audible version. In the beginning he did the narration voice like he was a computer (text to speech actually sounds better than that), only sounding human for the characters. And his female voice are ... borderline insulting. Everyone of them sounds like Marilyn Monroe or a drag queen.

Plodding

After a good “hook” this slowed to a crawl. A long description of an action sequence. And when that slowed, some sex scenes. Then a dull and overly detailed side journey to Nazi Poland followed by more stalling. Was this an attempt to build suspense? to include all of the author’s research? Eventually the story comes to an end. Thank heavens. Also - “narrator” voice sounded robotic and last half had “scratches” in the audio.