THE MYSTERY OF THE CROOKED MAN

Clearly, care and effort have gone into this audio production. Claire Warrillow's voice is lovely, and intervals of effectively spooky music add atmosphere. Warrillow voices Agatha Dorn, a solitary, resentful, gin-soaked, lesbian grammar snob and crank who might have been fun to watch on TV but is far less appealing as an unpleasant first-person voice in your head. Agatha is confounded by multiple messes, including an inexplicable suicide, a clear murder, and her own promoting of a "lost" manuscript that may be a forgery. Least successful of all is the insufficiently mysterious return of Agatha's childhood nemesis, a malevolent Crooked Man, supposedly mythic but clearly real and really dangerous. Unfortunately for the plot, this last is an unpuzzling puzzle that can have only one explanation. B.G. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine [Published: JULY 2025]