Mark Leder
8 books read for LibriVox
- Half the fun is watching Robert Audley, a lazy barrister who'd rather read French novels, get dragged into playing detective when his friend vanishes. It's Victorian gossip at its most deliciously wicked, and that portrait scene alone tells you Braddon knew exactly what she was doing.
- Middle book of Ford's Katharine Howard trilogy, and honestly the tensest: Cromwell's web is closing while Katharine, stubborn, Latin-quoting, too honest for the court, walks straight through it. The prose is dense and torchlit, all whispers in corridors, so read it slow, ideally after The Fifth Queen.
- If you want to watch Conrad and Ford try their hands at a pirate yarn, this is it: young John Kemp drifting into Cuban intrigue, the sinister O'Brien, a dreamlike siege at the Casa Riego. Slower and stranger than a true swashbuckler, but the atmosphere lingers.
- The Wife of Bath alone is worth the price of admission, bragging about outliving five husbands before her story even starts. It's rowdy, gossipy, sometimes flat-out filthy, and the Middle English takes patience, so grab a good modern edition and read it out loud.
- The last act of Ford's Katharine Howard trilogy: an honest woman as Henry VIII's queen, which the court cannot afford for long. Ford does Tudor light and shadow in prose that behaves like paint; slow, gorgeous, closing like a trap.
- You’re in for a strange, chilly political fantasy, where a journalist narrator encounters the calculating “Inheritors,” beings who claim the future belongs to them. It’s more interested in moral compromise and ideas than momentum, but its unsettling fourth-dimensional premise lingers.
- A short confession addressed to a married woman by a man who has been quietly embezzling a trust and expects to die for it. Conrad and Ford wrote it together and barely claimed it afterward; a curio, but the feverish voice holds for its hour.