Cate Barratt
10 books read for LibriVox
- You get a darker, more tangled Lupin here, framed for Kesselbach’s murder and pulled into a conspiracy that reaches far beyond a clever burglary. It’s less playful than the earlier stories, with disguises and reversals piling up, but the uneasy, almost ruthless Lupin makes it fascinating.
- You get Raffles and Bunny at their most polished: ingenious burglaries, close shaves, and Bunny’s anxious, admiring narration making every moral compromise feel oddly companionable. The stories are brisk and sly, though their gentleman-thief romanticism and late-Victorian attitudes can feel decidedly dated.
- You get a fierce, unsettling blend of story, testimony, and historical argument, with Clotel’s attempts to protect her family set against the hypocrisy of American freedom. The novel can feel episodic and openly didactic, but Brown’s anger, especially in the scenes of separation and pursuit, keeps it painfully immediate.
- You get a rough, episodic history play with flashes of Shakespearean energy, especially in Edward’s pursuit of the Countess of Salisbury and the Black Prince’s battlefield speeches. It’s uneven and not wholly Shakespeare’s, but the mix of courtly temptation, war, and sudden moral seriousness makes it an intriguing afternoon read.
- If a quiet English detective yarn with sea air suits you, this delivers: an actor vanishes near a ruined tower on the Yorkshire coast, and young Copplestone pokes around asking awkward questions. It's cozy rather than clever, Fletcher's puzzle tidy, the oily agent Chatfield good fun to distrust.
- The Condition of the Working Class in England non-fictionYou get a vivid, angry tour of industrial Manchester, with Engels moving from filthy housing and factory injuries to the lives of workers he meets and observes. It’s openly polemical and sometimes heavy with statistics, but its moral clarity and close attention to ordinary hardship still make the reading feel bracingly immediate.
- You’ll enjoy watching Lupin turn confession into another performance: charming, vain, generous, and never quite as trustworthy as he sounds. The stories feel like polished little puzzles, with disguises, stolen jewels, and sudden shifts in what you thought you understood, though the episodic structure can feel slightly uneven.
- Lupin actually loses for most of this one, which is what makes it fun: Daubrecq, a toad of a blackmailing politician, outplays him again and again while a man's date with the guillotine creeps closer. If you like your gentleman thief humbled and scrambling, start here.
- You’ll appreciate how Lawrence turns the captain’s rigid military authority and the young orderly’s fear into something physically charged and painfully intimate. It’s a bleak, claustrophobic story about repression and power, with a grim ending, but the emotional pressure feels startlingly modern.
- Lupin's here under a fake name (Don Luis Perenna), untangling an inheritance that keeps killing everyone in line for it, and the clue is literally teeth marks in an apple. Pure pulp, twist stacked on twist, longer and more melodramatic than the short stories.