Medieval Murders!

A jolly entertaining tale, although Bartholomew the Medic, never fails to be a dreadful judge of character!

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What happened to Cynric?

I love these stories and this was no exception. They are well written and generally well read but Cynric is a self confident and true Welshman. He would never have developed an educated English voice. It would be a matter of pride to him to keep his accent alive.

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Lots of conviving

So many players all full of greed and deception as driving forces.
A difficult case for Michael to resolve, both with ingenuity and friends they finally accomplish their mission.

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Strange changes

Love these books but the narrator ( who to my knowledge has done at least 15 of the books) changing the voices of many of the characters nearly ruined the book for me! Especially the Welsh book bearer not being Welsh any more !!

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What’s happened to David Thorpe?

To date, I have thoroughly enjoyed David Thorpe’s narration of the Matthew Bartholomew series.

But in this audiobook, he seemed to have forgotten the voices and accents he usually uses for the prominent characters. This was extremely disconcerting, and ruined the book for me.

For example, Cimric the Welshman has somehow transformed into a Londoner. There was no exaggerated Welsh accent which I have come to love from David Thorpe. Cimric does not sound like Cimric at all. Similarly, Michael’s voice has changed from the slightly camp, sarcastic and theatrical voice I love David Thorpe performing, to a deep, plummy voice with ‘r’s pronounced as ‘w’s. It just wasn’t Michael!
Clippesby’s gentle, distinctive voice has changed into a slightly moronic voice with a completely different tone. And William’s guttural, strident tones have simply morphed into a slow, oafish voice that isn’t William.

How has this happened? David Thorpe has read nearly all the books in this series using the same voices and accents for all the characters, and his performances have always been compelling. To hear the well-known characters speak with completely different voices and accents is just extremely off-putting.

I struggle to understand what has happened here, and why.

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Why the change?

Have been really enjoying this series but the narrator has suddenly changed the voices and pronunciations of the names of the characters.
it's quite jarring this far into a series.

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Continuing Audio Problems with this Series

I love David Thorpe's narration of these books and I love the way Susanna Gregory injects humor into them, they do literally a make me guffaw out loud but SO many of these books have audio problems - I have literally returned about six of them for this reason.

Either the audio skips mid sentence, or there are repeats, or the audio is very quiet and then suddenly very loud or muffled, it is a nonsense, and I have no idea why this isn't resolved as they are such popular books. They should sack the editor or production editor, whoever is responsible for checking them before the release them, it is so disappointing.

I struggle on because I love the books and also because Audible allows me to return the ones which you cannot listen to, but it really is a joke.

I also don't like the fact that, half way through the series, David Thorpe change all the characters voices. Cymric, the Welsh book bearer, who is Welsh in most of them, suddenly becomes English, Brother Michael (whose 'normal' voice I adore), becomes deep and throaty in some volumes which sounds odd when you're used to his more fey voice. I have discovered that the ones released in 2017 all seem to have the normal voices, and the earlier ones (not based on book publication but based on the audio release, the 2014 ones, tend to have different voices and accents, and this is not necessarily chronological in the series, so now I check in advance to see which year the audio was released as I got seriously muddled when he changed all the voices (Mind you, I AM easy to confuse).

But PLEASE sort out the audio problems and PLEASE also publish the rest of these books.

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8 people found this helpful

I was warned!

Is there anything you would change about this book?

I suppose it is inevitable, but I find these stories getting a bit same old..

Would you recommend Death of a Scholar to your friends? Why or why not?

Not particularly.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

I read the other reviews about the narrator but got the book anyway. Big mistake. I could not bear some of the voices, they were so irritating. This narrator is not a patch on the narrator of the previous books whose voice was very soothing but you knew which character was speaking. This narrator's voice is extremely jarring. I would not listen to another book read by him.

If this book were a film would you go see it?

I probably would.

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Red herring

Lots of red herrings and so many different plots going on as well as the usual intricate ins and outs of our usual characters life’s

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Voice change?

Confused why Cinrik no longer sounds Welsh and Michael’s voice is much deeper.... also Clippsby’s voice was not right either.... very confusing.

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