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To Wake the Dead cover art

To Wake the Dead

By: John Dickson-Carr
Narrated by: Jonathan Keeble
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Summary

Christopher Kent, worth a quarter of a million pounds yet not a penny in his pocket, stands hungrily in Piccadilly one snowy morning looking up at the huge hotel when a piece of card bearing a number floats down to him.

He enters the hotel and is served with breakfast, giving the waiter the room number to charge. Then an unlucky chance compels him to go up to room 707. Inside a woman lies murdered in a trunk. Kent needs to prove his innocence fast and calls Dr Gideon Fell to investigate - but there’s been another murder, and Dr Fell must figure out what connects them.

©2017 John Dickson-Carr (P)2017 Oakhill Publishing

What listeners say about To Wake the Dead

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One of the best

First, thank you to Audible for finally bringing John Dickson Carr to us at last.

This is a nice little mystery. I'd read it a few years ago and could remember who did it but not how or why. Famous for his locked room mysteries, John Dickson Carr makes this a locked room mystery without the locked room; so to speak.

As usual with a lot of authors, the majority of the clues lie at the start of the book, within maybe the first three or four chapters so by the end you've forgotten them. This is always a neat trick if you can pull it off and Dickson Carr is one of it's masters. As with the characters, you will be guessing wrongly throughout the book and then realise all the answers were there all the time.

As for narration, this is one of the best narrations of a book that I have found in years. The voices are all extremely well done, the pace is perfect and the Jonathan Keeble has a beautiful voice for this work.

On the whole, brilliant! Thanks, Audible, can we have some more please?

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9 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Perfect marriage of material and performance

This is my first Dickson Carr - so can’t say if it’s representative of his other works; but it’s well-written - witty, detailed, pacey - and has a vast array of suspects. But the icing on the cake is the performance- Jonathan Keeble masters narration, accents, male and female voices with an ease which does not draw attention to itself but enhances the storytelling. I’ll keep an ear out for anything else this chap has narrated.

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8 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Started well but

The story started well, and at first I was intrigued. 

A murder involving a locked room in a hotel, several suspect, the victims husband was murdered a few months previously and in the same way, and the "supposed" perpetrator of that crime is already locked up but claiming innocence. 

There is also a mysterious missing bracelet which may have a secret inscription or 'criptex'!!!

It had the feel of a cross between Sherlock Holmes and the old radio plays from the fifties of Dr Morrell with Cecil Parker sometimes broadcast on Radio 4xtra.

The plot and back histories of the characters got very complicated and none of the characters were very endearing. 

I soon began to lose interest and just wanted to find out who the Murderer was and WHY although I got to the stage where I wasn't really that bothered....

Having said that if there is another Dr Fell audible book available I would probably take a chance and buy it.

I have to say that the voice characterisations by Jonathan Keeble were good.

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PERFECT READER!

Jonathan Keeble is a perfect reader for John Dickson Carr! This book is not among the best Carr or Gideon Fell books, but I am so happy that audiobooks by Carr is finally being produced, never having been done so before. A worst-case scenario now is that Gordon Griffin should be hired to read and ruin the Carr books with his horrible performances. Please keep Jonathan Keeble for the entire Dr. Fell series. Gordon Griffin will ruin these master pieces for sure! Keep him away! Please!

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    3 out of 5 stars

Masterfully read

Jonathan Keeble is a virtuoso voice artist, up there with Martin Jarvis. His performance kept my interest despite a rather stodgy Carr whodunnit with one of his more ridiculous endings. Certainly not "The Hollow Man" in that regard.

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Very good puzzler.

Read with depth of characterisation and with the humour shining through the twists and turns of Dr Fell's detecting methods, very entertaining.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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nicely narrated by a style reminiscent of Sherlock

I liked the narrator. Accents brought the depth needed to what could have been an awful monologue in the wrong reader. Detective stories that take ages to conclude can often be rushed at the end. Noir style, very British slow pace. Right up my street.

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  • Overall
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Another classic

A brilliant mystery from Dickson Carr as always, a classic in the genre. Well read and entertaining.

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