PRETTY THINGS

Julia Whelan and Lauren Fortgang perform a near-perfect duet narrating this utterly absorbing psychological thriller. Whelan's Nina is a grifter. She is bright and shrewd and is ready to go straight, but she needs one big score to pay for cancer treatments for her charming con woman mother. Nina's mark is Vanessa, a socialite media influencer, apparently all entitlement and vanity, whose family once did a terrible thing to teenaged Nina. Or so Nina believes. Fortgang gives Vanessa a slightly different timbre from Nina, somehow shallower and more helpless but not especially sympathetic--or so it seems. Somehow the worst people come across as most appealing, a hugely effective diversion as you unravel who the real cons and marks are. A winning production. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2020]