My novel Murder on Book Row is live and available for purchase in the Apple audiobooks store! This is the fifth book of mine to go live for readers who prefer to consume books that way. It’s the second of my novels to become an audiobook.

You can check out the book right here, and buy it outright for $4.99. It’s a traditional mystery in which a bookselling sleuth known as the Book Lady solves murders. Some people would call this a cozy, but I don’t think it’s nearly as sweet as modern cozies are expected to be. It’s inspired greatly by the original Nero Wolfe mysteries. And I have a soft spot in my heart for the book, considering it is one of the first books I ever wrote. You can find out more about that story in an article entitled:

Patio Writer

When you release novels, there are inevitably ones that rise to the top. Murder on Book Row apparently connected with plenty of people because it’s one of my better-selling titles.

That said, this is another book that I must absolutely pursue hiring a human narrator to read.

I like the Apple Audiobooks version, which is read by an AI voice, but there are plenty of little things that crop up in the course of the reading that demonstrate the superiority of a human reader.

I’m not sure why, but I use a lot of foreign words in my writing. Murder on Book Row features a lot of Italian words because my protagonist is an Italian American woman who loves food. She’s constantly spouting off the names of obscure Italian dishes. A human narrator would research the pronunciation of such words, or ask me how to say them.

The AI narrator does no such thing. It just assumes that the word it is expected to pronounce is an American English word, and so it pronounces the word that way, with hilarious results. It would almost certainly know how to pronounce pasta or spaghetti, but beyond that, it’s a free-for-all.

When my wife narrated her first audiobook at the Brilliance studios in the midwest, she had multiple editors just outside the sound booth who had already researched the pronunciation of all the unusual words in her text. They were standing by to pause her in her narration and say such things as, “Okay, the way you just pronounced that word is actually the way they say it in Canada. Here’s the American way. Would you like to do it that way, or the way they say it in the UK?”

I mean, that’s how specific they would get.

Murder on Book Row is a full-length novel, so it clocks in at 8 hours and 5 minutes long.

Using digital voices to record audiobooks is somewhat controversial at the moment. I went into this in some detail in my first audiobook post, so I won’t rehash it here. If you want, you can check out the rationale and economics in that earlier post.

That all said, if you are interested in audiobooks, I hope you’ll check out the current crop of three that I currently have available—Murder on Book Row, Jersey Heat, and Arm of Darkness—if you find their content (and price points) attractive. Only available on Apple and via the Overdrive system in libraries.

More are coming!