PENANCE

For Housewright's first Holland Taylor novel, a 1996 Edgar winner, R.C. Bray delivers a perfect raspy-voiced private eye who is dragged into a murder case that the cops really want him to solve since it's a political flytrap. Bray also does a credible job with a host of other characters--cops, lawyers, blackmailers, politicos, and aides. One aide is at first way too brusque-voiced to be bearable, but Bray settles in. Even when the story lapses into lecture mode on the life of a P.I. or Taylor succumbs to his softer romantic side, Bray keeps up the momentum--only losing it a bit, and obscuring some vital clues, when he reads every semicolon and backslash in an Internet report on some suspects. D.P.D. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine [Published: JANUARY 2013]