Sufficiently Entertaining Tale

The pacing in this Lauran Paine novel is genuinely plodding. Even the action sequences are written with little tempo. This is an excellent "background" audiobook that you can listen to while doing some gardening or something - but don't expect your pulse rate to go up.
Paine is famous (infamous?) for writing 5-6 novels per year, and this mid-90s effort demonstrates the almost obligatory deficiencies that come with that level of productivity. The plot is a straightforward "ethical good guys vs greedy, scheming bad guys" story (you can almost picture the White & Black hats), the characters are two-dimensional, and the resolution is strikingly predictable.
Fortunately, Paine's descriptions are excellent, his setting is cinematic, and he delivers pretty much exactly what you expect to get if you're hunting for a stereotypical "Western".
The end result is a solidly "adequate" Old-West adventure about cowboy/cattlemen fighting over grazing land.

Barrett Whitener reads with commendable voice-acting (eschewing foolish accents) and creditable diction & timbre, but matches the slow pace of the plot with a much-too-slow reading rate (set playback at 1.20X). Compounding the errors, Whitener also exhibits a mechanical cadence and a somewhat robotic monotone.. the "passable" narration (at best) punctuates the more boring aspects of the narrative.

Average Writing + Average Presentation = Average Audiobook. 'Open Range' rates 5 stars out of 10.
If you can get it as a 'Plus' option (free with your subscription), you're not crazy to give it a try - it was short enough to be a pleasant afternoon diversion for an afficianado of the genre - but save your Credit for something else if they ask for it.

ATTN PRODUCERS: A Navigable Menu would approve this product considerably: Chapters in the download do not line up with chapters in the text.

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