ROSE

Freshly returned from Africa, Jonathan Blair, an adventurer suffering from malaria and lack of funds, is hired by a wealthy family of northern England to find a missing fiancé. In this nineteenth-century environment, Blair meets miners, gentry, coal dust, violence and a seductive pit girl named Rose. Steven Crossley is an adept reader whose involvement with the text brings out the sounds of the miner's clogs on the cobbled streets, the pounding of flesh against flesh. Even the intricacies of the Northern dialect and the delicacies of the English manor are part of the imagery he presents in his faultless reading. J.P. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine [Published: OCT/ NOV 02]