Hell Gate

May 31, 2010
Multiple Audie Award–winning narrator Barbara Rosenblat brings her considerable talent to Fairstein's latest thriller featuring New York ADA Alex Cooper. When a boat carrying illegal human cargo shipwrecks off the city's coast, spilling its payload of immigrant contraband into the ocean, a body is discovered that appears to have been dead before it hit the freezing water. How this event in human smuggling will relate to a philandering congressman and what happens to his mistress is only part of the mystery that keeps Fairstein's story barreling forward. Rosenblat's appealing voice nicely handles the twists and turns of the author's narrative. She manages to balance numerous characters of varying ethnicities with ease, bringing a natural delivery to their dialogue while at the same time keeping them distinct enough from each other to allow for easy delineation between who's speaking to whom, but she never goes overboard or allows herself to fall into caricature. It's a fine performance that will keep the listener hooked to the very end. A Dutton hardcover (Reviews, Jan. 4).

Fans of Linda Fairstein will delight in the snarl of clues that has Prosecutor Alexandra Cooper trying to uncover what the murder of Congressman Ethan Leighton's extracurricular girlfriend has to do with the wreck of a boatload of human cargo from Ukraine. Barbara Rosenblat has a field day with Alex's street-smart sidekick, Detective Mike Chapman, and a slew of other New York characters, especially as they deliver great gobbets of the history of Gracie and Jumel mansions, Hell Gate, and much else as the plot rockets Mike and Alex around Manhattan. Best of all, Rosenblat masterfully controls the pace, infusing simple sentences with warning, tension, terror, or relief as the story requires. Forget movies; with a narrator like this, who needs visuals or soundtracks? B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine