Tuesday, October 1, 2019

Chaos in Death by Nora Roberts aka JD Robb


Rating: WARTY!

I should have guessed from the absurd title that this audiobook wasn't for me, but I started listening to it anyway, so I have only myself to blame. Also it's by Nora Roberts. The JD Robb author name is a lie. I don't honestly know why authors lie about their authorship, but that's the way it is unfortunately. If I'd known this was part of a fifty book series all titles ending with "...in death" I would never have picked it up, but not only is the author lying, the publisher is too! There was nothing whatsoever on the cover of this book to indicate it was a part of a series. This one, absurdly, was volume 33.5!

The story is a bit bizarre. The reader, Susan Ericksen, is way too melodramatic, but I can't hold her completely at fault for that because the material is so poorly-written. The story starts with this guy - I assume it's a guy - who is putting the finishing touches to a triple murder he's committed and he's talking so ridiculously that I expect him to don a top hat and a cape when he was finished, and twirl his mustaches fiendishly.

Even when the cops show up the dialog is inane, and there's the trope of the one cop about ready to barf at the crime scene. I know that some people actually are very sensitive, but it's such a trope, especially in this day and age where blood and gore are in every other movie and cops are very often used to violence. We are largely inured to it now, and while I concede that movie gore and violence isn't like experiencing the real thing, this farcical trope of the barfing cop is long past its sell-by date, and it's just irritating to me. I quit it right there.

So this story and me? No way in hell!