Wednesday, November 9, 2016

The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters


Rating: WARTY!

This was an audiobook I picked up on spec at my delightful local library. I tend to experiment more with audio books taking chances on things I might not be interested in looking at in print or e-format. It turned out that the title was more entertaining than the novel. The Last Camel Died at Noon by Elizabeth Peters, when read as a sentence like that, suggests that at midday, near where Elizabeth was standing, the last camel died! The story itself, which is number six in a mystery series, was not listenable. The prose was entirely too florid for my taste, making it sound far more like the author was more intent upon impressing herself with how well she could portray Victorian characters, than ever she was in getting on with the story. On top of this, I didn’t like the two main characters, and certainly was not interested in listening through a long book about them.

The story is supposedly set in Egypt although the main characters had not arrived there by the time I gave up on this, and actually didn’t even remotely seem like they would ever get there at the rate they were going. It was too ponderous and too pretentious, and I really couldn’t stand it or Barbara Rosenblatt’s narration. Based on what I listened to which was admittedly not much, I can’t recommend this one.