Panic Room

By: Robert Goddard

Narrated by: Hollie Taylor, John Sackville

Length: 12 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

Random House presents the audiobook edition of Panic Room by Robert Goddard, read by Hollie Taylor and John Sackville.

Sometimes the danger is on the inside....

High on a Cornish cliff sits a vast uninhabited mansion. Uninhabited except for Blake, a young woman of dubious background, secretive and alone, currently acting as housesitter.

The house has a panic room. Cunningly concealed, steel lined, impregnable - and apparently closed from within. Even Blake doesn’t know it’s there. She’s too busy being on the run from life, from a story she thinks she’s escaped.

But her remote existence is going to be invaded when people come looking for the house’s owner, missing rogue pharma entrepreneur Jack Harkness. Suddenly the whole world wants to know where his money has gone. Soon people are going to come knocking on the door, people with motives and secrets of their own, who will be asking Blake the sort of questions she can’t - or won’t - want to answer.

And will the panic room ever give up its secrets?

Panic Room is Robert Goddard at his nerve-shredding best. A sliver of a mystery kicks off a juggernaut of a thriller. Layers of secrets, half truths and lies must be peeled back to reveal what really lies within.

©2018 Robert Goddard (P)2018 Random House Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"The world's greatest storyteller." (The Guardian)

"Is this his best yet?... Full of sinister menace and propulsive pace with twisty plotting." (Lee Child)

One narrator poorly cast

The male narrator is excellent. The female narrator is completely the wrong person to cast. She’s wrong for the part, and that’s down to the production team not her. So, the issue is that she completely misinterprets the tone of the book and characters in the story. There’s no depth in her interpretation. The characters are either always flippant always stupid or always haughty. It’s just tedious. What’s more the male narrator has the interpretation perfectly correct and is a pleasure to listen to. So it’s like reading two books at the same time and every time her section starts it’s a shock to the system (like a cold shower) and I have to rephrase everything she says to make sense of the story line. At the beginning it didn’t irritate me that much but I’m not even half way in and it’s getting really tedious and irritating. She just gets it all wrong. Everything.

The story is excellent. I’ve read and listened to every Robert Goddard book and they are really special. So it’s still worth getting the book. The upsides far outweigh the downside. But production team… come on. I cannot understand how they thought this pairing would work.

Weak storyline and terrible narration

I have read or listened to all the Goddard novels up to this one. Reviewers have stressed how bad the narration is, and I concur, especially regarding the female narrator trying to do male voices. This is Goddard's first attempt to introduce a science fiction element into a story, and it fails miserably. In fact, the writing seems so unlike his style in general that I'm wondering whether the second author (mentioned in the afterward, but not given credit up until then) is responsible for writing much -- if not all -- of the novel. This suspicion is supported by a very curious statement in which Goddard agrees to be identified as the sole author of the novel. What?