The Boyfriend reintroduces readers to Jack Till, a retired
LAPD homicide detective turned private investigator who first starred in
Thomas Perry's 2007 novel Silence. Jack usually works routine
cases, but the parents of a recently murdered girl, Catherine Hamilton,
come to him in desperation. They've just discovered that Catherine was
working as a high-class prostitute, and the cops are dismissive,
chalking her death up to the hazards of her occupation.
Till starts
looking into the matter and discovers that Catherine seems to have had a
boyfriend who vanished with all her money and jewelry. What's more,
Catherine's actually the fifth escort with strawberry-blonde hair shot
in the head over the last couple of months. Convinced he's unearthed a
serial killer, Till delves into the case, which leads him on a
nationwide hunt for the brilliant, good-looking, but disturbed
"Boyfriend."
Robertson Dean's deep voice is a bit jarring in the first chapter,
told from Catherine's perspective, but because the rest of the story
alternates between the points of view of Till and the Boyfriend, his
narration is pitch perfect, bringing the detective's determined hunting
and the killer's increasingly desperate (and foolish) crime spree to
life.
The plot of The Boyfriend is not exactly original, but on audio it still plays out well and Dean makes the minutes fly by. The Boyfriend is a perfect summer audio book--meant to be listened to while jogging down a beach or lazing next to the pool.
I reviewed this for Shelf Awareness, which is mostly why I kept listening after disc one, since it didn't initally grab my attention. But after another disc or two I got kind of mesmerized by Dean's voice, so I kept going.
Rating: 2 out of 5 for actual book, 3.5 out of 5 for audio production
Should I recommend this to my grandma? Probably not. There were a LOT of prostitutes, some dead, some, um... busy.
Do you sometimes listen to books that you'd never actually read?
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