Funeral in Blue Audiobook By Anne Perry cover art

Funeral in Blue

William Monk, Book 12

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Funeral in Blue

By: Anne Perry
Narrated by: Ralph Lister
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Two beautiful women have been found strangled in the studio of a well-known London artist. To investigator William Monk and his wife, Hester, the murders are a nightmare. One of the victims is the wife of Hester’s cherished colleague, surgeon Dr. Kristian Beck, a Viennese émigré who becomes the prime suspect.

With an intensity born of desperation, the Monks seek evidence that will save Dr. Beck from the hangman. From London’s sinister slums to the crowded coffeehouses of Vienna, where embers of the revolution still burn in the hearts of freedom-loving men and women, Hester and Monk seek to penetrate not only the mystery of Elissa Beck’s death but the riddle of her life.

“Perry’s historical mysteries suggestively peel away layer after layer of Victorian respectability until the underlying social evils of a gilded era are exposed in all their naked truth.”—New York Times Book Review

©2001 Anne Perry (P)2024 Recorded Books Mystery Historical Thriller & Suspense Police Procedurals Marriage Heartfelt
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The narrator swallowed the ends of sentences at times, making them inaudible or the sound might have faded. I did not like the voices. Some always sounded angry to me instead of having more nuance.

Usual Anne Perry slice of life story with lots of details

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I’ve read every book in this series except a few that are not on Audible for some reason. For two of the ones that aren’t on Audible, I actually purchased the hardback version and scanned them into a TTS app. I like the series that much, but don’t have the time to sit still and read a “book book”.

Most of the books follow approximately the same framework, with a different friend or relative in trouble. I still enjoy this series very much. I’m mostly hooked on the personal relationships, but I enjoy the historical references. Some of the descriptive paragraphs get a little wordy and I tend to tune out a bit at those times, but the overall writing is superior.

The narrator on this edition was very difficult for me to stick with. His normal speaking/narration voice was fine, but he tended to make all of the men sound almost identically and hysterically angry, and as if their voice belonged to a 77-year-old man with a permanently raspy throat. This tampered with William Monk’s lovely appeal, which is not acceptable. The women all sounded like the Monty Python Pepperpots (see YouTube). I believe I will be either buying and scanning the hardbacks again for the rest of the books utilizing this narrator…

Great series, highly recommended

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I’ve enjoyed the series up to now, but all dialogue is delivered as though the characters are yelling at each other in growling angry voices… constantly. Is this supposed to add suspense? Absolutely abysmal. I finished it and it got slightly better. But what a sad change of narrator in this series. Poorly poorly performed.

Compelling story. Horrible narration.

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I would stop listening, but there is another book narrated by him and i don't want to miss 2 books..I will continue, but it's so difficult. When he does dialogue his voice is so mean,,no matter who's speaking..even Hester. When he is just reading, he's fine, But his hoarse, mean, angry voice in dialogue is horrendous and so wrong.

horrible narration

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Mr Lister clearly has acting acumen. He just didn’t feel like using it for Anne Perry. No matter the sense and sentence, his pedantic repetitive cadence remained. Perhaps that he just thought this was beneath his craft? His dialect changes were minimal, his careless depictions of our beloved characters, held up with great respect from previous narrators, were made into two-dimensional, emotionally petulant, caricatures. No dimension of class, age, past, almost as Mr Lister did not read or listen to the prior books. So disappointing and quite frankly disrespectfully confounding. Honestly I blame the producers/directors. Anne Perry deserves far more than this. And knowing that he is the narrator of hers more and more is so sad.

The Unfortunate Result of Uncaring and Lazy Narration

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