brilliantly read

Brilliantly read, with only one problem. It's M I 6 not M Sixteen. Otherwise a good performance and a great story.

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Wow

I think most of my kids are get in to this set of audio book

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A series review, rather than individual ones.

The Order of the Black Sun series, basically, harkens back to the old pulp novels of investigators/scientists vs horrifying cults/evil baddies/Nazis, with a bit of a modern twist. They are generally fun reads, a little light on scientific accuracy in places, featuring a trio of protagonists who hail from Edinburgh: a modern historian, a Pulitzer winning reporter and a millionaire/billionaire (the books can't quite keep it straight which is the case) tech inventor.

Now the bad part: American narrators, yes, plural, across the series.

Any Brit listening to these is going to be constantly on edge waiting for the horrendous mispronunciations and accents. Some examples:

The narrator of the first two stories kept on referring to MI6 as M16.

The accents of the three protagonists jump about, at first I thought the reporter was meant to be Irish but when their abode was confirmed I realised he was meant to be Scots, but its strength comes and goes across the series; the other two protagonists have zero Scots accents, the historian can kind of be explained as she spent time in other universities, but the inventor often ends up sounding like a brash American businessman.

Place names, oh god, after 13 books I think I've only heard Edinburgh correctly pronounced once, but I suspect it was an accident on the part of the narrator; mostly it's a mix of Edinborough, Edinbruh (yes, the "r" before the "u"), and Edinburg (hard "g"). Then there's the one book that's predominantly set in Lyon, except, for the first two thirds of the book, where the narrator calls it Lion, even when being pronounced by a French taxi driver; I can only presume someone with a bit of knowledge walked in and asked why they kept talking about lions...

Despite all this, however, they are fun and should be enjoyed in a light-hearted manner.

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3 people found this helpful

Weirdly almost enjoyable...

I got this book as a free offer, so bearing this in mind, here is my honest review.
This is the beginning of a series in the style of a sort of Indian Jones type globetrotting adventure. I have some issues.
The story, overall is actually a lot of fun and I was quite happy to listen to the whole thing. In detail however the writing is all over the place, with bizarre leaps in continuity and the requirement to not only suspend your disbelief, but to actively hang it out to dry. In the rain.
I won't give any spoilers, but trust me on this.
The main character are all Scottish, apart from a smaterring of other nationalities. So the narrator is American. The exposition is fine. He can do the American bits quite well too. He cannot do a Scottish accent. It might be that I am particularly hard to please in this area, being Scottish myself, but ALL this narrators accents are terrible. Basically, they all sound vaguely irish/Pakistani with different ways of pronouncing 'th' badly. Sadly there are no characters of irish/Pakistani parentage, so he missed a trick there. As I said, I finished the books, but there where many parts where I laughed at the unintentional comedy of it.

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