Jun 17, 2011 ARCHIVES | Entertainment | COLUMNS Don Winslow
Unabridged, Blackstone (www.BlackstoneAudio.com)
ISBN NA
NA pages
$7 1/2 hours, 6 CDs, $38; 1 MP3 disk, $29.95; 6 tapes, $27.48; audible.com download, $17.47
Reviewed by Katherine A. Powers
Published in 1998 and only now appearing in an audio version, this is the fourth in Don Winslow's series of five blood-splattered romps starring private investigator and student of 18th-century literature Neal Carey. The books, all available from Blackstone, are read by Joe Barrett. They can be listened to in any order -- but perhaps only in private by those who don't wish to be seen barking with laughter. Everyone -- including media hounds, a bibulous gumshoe, a patrician lawyer and a passel of mobsters -- is after Polly Paget, the bimbo-ish former girlfriend of Jackson Landis, a married family-values TV show host. Neal's job is to hide Polly and teach her elocution, repairing her gum-snapping diction before she appears in court to testify to having been raped by Landis. (Happily, there is none of the torture and sadism that deform Winslow's later work.) Joe Barrett's narration is excellently hard-boiled and his characters aptly voiced: Neal is superbly exasperated; Polly, steel-cored ditzy; the wiseguys, an amalgam of dopiness and menace; the boozy detective is flummoxed; and the upper-crust lawyer is fatuousness itself.
Katherine A. Powers regularly reviews audio books for The Washington Post.
Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group
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