Review: The Girl Who Knew Too Much

One thing the collective we don't talk about enough is how what format you consume a story in can affect your enjoyment of that story, for good or ill.  As a long time audiobook listener (cough, cassettes, cough), I learned this very early on. I'll be honest, most narrators land in a middle ground for me. I don't notice them half the time. But the really bad ones?  Those stick out. Which brings me to The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Amanda Quick, the first in her Burning Cove series.  If I had read this it would have fallen into the very definition of a comfort read for me. Quick is a pro and can spin a good story, despite some foibles in this story that didn't work for me. No, instead I listened to the audio edition narrated by Louise Jane Underwood, and folks - it was not good. But more on that in a minute....

Spoilers

Anna Harris is an efficient, competent secretary for a wealthy woman in New York, until the night she shows up at her employer's country house to discover the woman very much dead. Obviously murdered, what with the blood spatter all over the place. In fact there's so much blood that her employer scrawls out a message to Anna - "Run."  As Anna is grabbing her personal belongings she finds that the shoebox where she was stashing her savings contains a lot more money than what she saved, a mysterious notebook, and a letter from her employer explaining that the notebook is valuable and that Anna might be able to use it for leverage.  The fly in the ointment? Anna can't make heads or tails of the numbers and scribblings in the notebook.

Anna ends up running all the way to Los Angeles, California, changes her name to Irene Glasson, and takes a job writing for a seedy gossip rag. This is the 1930s, gossip about Hollywood stars is in high demand, and Irene has stumbled into a humdinger of a story about a rising leading man. She heads to Burning Cove, an exclusive resort outside of LA that caters to the Hollywood elite, to meet with a woman who says she has dirt on this leading man. Too bad when Irene goes to meet this woman she finds her very much dead, drowned in the hotel's spa. I mean, this girl and dead bodies - what are the odds?

Oliver Ward is a former magician and was rather successful until an on stage "accident" ended his career. Now he owns the Burning Cove Hotel.  He prides himself on the exclusivity and privacy his hotel offers, so Irene, a reporter, being there isn't great, but the dead body is more worrisome.  I mean, he can't have guests getting murdered in his establishment, it's bad for business. So to get his own answers he's going to stick close to Irene, and they agree to work as a team. Of course things get stickier when Irene's past comes back to haunt her. 

I want to start off by saying I loved the setting of this story and Quick does a great job with it. 1930s California, a golden era in Hollywood movies, the fashion, night clubs catering to the elite in a post-Prohibition world, it's all great stuff.

So what's the problem?  This narrator y'all. The voices for Oliver and Irene were fine but the majority of the secondary characters were just terrible. The women sound like Gal Fridays in screwball comedies and the men all sound like 1930s radio ad men.  It's like the characters were SCREAMING! IN! ALL! CAPS! WITH! ENDLESS! EXCLAMATION! POINTS!

This was exhausting. And annoying. And because it was annoying I started to nit-pick things that I suspect would have rolled right off my back had I read this book.

Anna is on the run and in the 1930s assuming a new identity was easier than it is today. She also does a decent job of covering her tracks and is smart to run across the entire country. Then she loses me by taking a job has a gossip columnist in Los Angeles when waitress or factory worker are RIGHT THERE! For that matter she could have buried herself someplace like Middle of Nowhere, Oregon and nobody would have found her. Of course the bad guy who murdered her former boss ends up finding her and the way he finds her?  Through her current job of course (her picture ends up in the papers because of course it does).

Then there's the two mysteries thing - which felt like word count filler. The Hollywood mystery should have been enough, but instead we get the first murder which bakes in a espionage plot and then we have the secret of what happened when Oliver almost got killed on stage and it all felt disjointed. As a reader I was getting pulled into too many different directions.

The romance is fine but a little flat. Oliver and Irene make a good team in the mystery department but I'm not sure I really got "passion" and of course there's a marriage proposal after they've known each other for, like, a week. 

I ended up slogging my way to the end and was happy to put it behind me because y'all, this narrator. Oof!  Had I read this book my grade would probably be around a B-. I think I still would have nitpicked the plot half to death (I'm nothing if not on brand) but I would have ended this review with something like "it's not perfect but I had a good time reading it and inhaled it in two sittings."  Instead after a 2+ week slog on audio, we're left here.

Final Grade = C-