Narrated by Joyce Bean
I picked up Genuine Lies for review based on two facts: I like Nora Roberts’ writing and Joyce Bean is an A list, professional narrator. The combination seemed to guarantee a good listen. I did not factor it two other things: it was first published in 1991, and it’s almost 20 hours long!
Julia Summers is a celebrity biographer hired by Eve Benedict, an aging Hollywood legend, to write her memoirs. However, once word gets out that Eve is planning to spill everyone’s darkest secrets, all the players in Eve’s life – including multiple husbands and lovers, mob bosses, employees both current and former – start sweating the things they’ve done that could come back to haunt them in a best-seller. More than one of them plan ways to stop the book – stop Eve from sharing that which is better left unpublished – and Julia starts receiving threats to her own life.
The book just bristles with the 1980s vibe – it’s like a saga (think Judith McNaught’s contemporaries), even though the time span of the story itself takes only a few months. As Eve relays the details of her life, though, decades are covered, starting when Eve was a young actress struggling to make a living in the Golden Age of Hollywood and rubbing elbows with all the greats. As in all good whodunits, there are more possible suspects and red herrings than a lively game of Clue. Eve hasn’t exactly been Mother Teresa all these years – far from it – and she’s managed to turn even her closest friends into potential enemies. She wasn’t someone I would want in my circle of friends, I can tell you that!
As I expected, Joyce Bean delivers a competent, professional narration (did I mention it’s almost 20 hours?). Full disclosure: I genuinely respect her work, but Bean is actually not one of my favorite narrators. I find her delivery a little clinical although I can’t really pinpoint why. She has credibly low registers for her male voices, including Eve’s stepson Paul (the hero) and all the various ex-husbands. Her female voices are differentiated well from each other – the smoky voice of the aging star Eve contrasts with the higher-pitched, younger sound of heroine Julia. Her pacing is professional and I have no issues at all with her breathing or any other technical problems I’ve encountered in other audiobooks. She has the kind of delivery that just takes me a while to settle into, for some reason, so it’s usually a few hours in before I stop picking apart the narration and start listening 100% to the story. All that being said, I still prefer her performance to many others!
My other – hmmm – I hesitate to say problems – challenges? with this book are really because it’s vintage, it’s truly awash in 1980s culture, so I needed to think of it less as a Contemporary Romantic Suspense, and more a slice of history (in both the style of writing as well as the times she relates!). Everyone smokes so much in this book! The almost soap opera quality of all the adultery and bed-hopping is mind-numbing. The lack of modern conveniences like smart phones doesn’t really stick out so much if you keep in mind that it’s well before the Internet became ubiquitous, with everyone carrying tiny computers in their pockets. Even though I didn’t find it on par with La Nora’s more current Romantic Suspense novels, the story has a lot to offer fans of Nora Roberts, of saga-like whodunits, of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
[section label=’Audiobook Information’ anchor=’Audiobook Information’]
Melinda
AUDIOBOOK INFORMATION
TITLE: Genuine LIes
AUTHOR: Nora Roberts
NARRATED BY: Joyce Bean
GENRE: Romantic Suspense
STEAM FACTOR: Glad I had my earbuds in
REVIEWER: Melinda [button type=’link’ link=’http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00P87S0UW/?tag=audiogalsnet-20′ size=’btn-lg’ variation=’btn-default’ target=’blank’]Buy Genuine LIes by Nora Roberts on Amazon[/button] [section label=’Excerpt’ anchor=’Excerpt’]EXCERPT:
