Hide and Seek

Narrator Elizabeth Bower does her best with this new audio entry in the DI Helen Grace crime series. She is good at accents and does her best to accommodate choppy shifts of scenes and points of view, but Arlidge's prose style is a pretty blunt instrument. Clich�s abound, not always even carefully chosen, the vocabulary is repetitive, and the plotting excessively violent. Also, the plot picks up where an earlier book in the series left off, so brace for backstory. Here Detective Grace is in prison awaiting trial for crimes she didn't commit when an inmate down the corridor is murdered. Then another. Interesting setup, no question. Fans of the previous book will probably want to know how it plays out. Others may prefer starting elsewhere. B.G. � AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine