The Guise of Another

Great listen, terrific narrator

It's been awhile since I've listened to a book where I couldn't predict at least some of what was going to happen. I would have liked a different ending but it was still very enjoyable. The kind of book that keeps me sitting in my car. I haven't listened to this author before nor have I heard this narrator. The narrator was terrific, didn't interfere with the book at all.

33 of 35 people found this review helpful

I loved the characters

Once again Allen Eskens lets his characters evolve. Both of the books by Eskens have been among the most engaging and intellectually gratifying books I have read.

31 of 33 people found this review helpful

Cracking Good Noir

A delicious tale with a complex plot twisting like cream stirred slowly into very ghost coffee. It's got it all: loyal but fallible heroes, femme fatales, deep betrayals reaching up after years to drag down empires and the good and evil both.

My only complaint is that after much foreshadowing one of the villains turned out-I think-to be a random minor character. Then again, I may have misheard.

24 of 27 people found this review helpful

Not the same writer

Life we Bury was a great book with well developed characters whose lives were Interesting enough that you wanted to learn more and more about them. Very satisfying and I was looking forward to the next book by Eskens. The question is did he actually wrote this? The characters were so uninteresting and stereotyped that it was actually painful. I listened to it as quickly as possible just to get it over with.It was as if he threw all his writing skills in the garbage and just plough end ahead. And the reader-awful. I will avoid anything he does. That wasn't fun.

17 of 19 people found this review helpful

The Book Was OK Expect For The Ending

While this book is surely not as good as his first, "The Life We Bury," it is certainly not a bad listen. Eskens's debut book was phenomenal. It had everything I love and I'm sure many readers would agree. However, I don't think "The Guise Of Another" is a waste. I love a good mystery and this book did deliver on that aspect. It also had some twists and turns that I wasn't expecting, so that is always a plus.

I understand why some listeners have the complaints they do such as not identifying with the main character and being able to "like" Alexander. My thoughts on that are that most every book you listen to you are pulling for the main character. You hope for good things to happen to that character. You want everything to work out for that character in the end. This book was different and it annoyed me! When the story unwinds and you find out some things about Alexander, you're not sure how to feel. Eskens makes you think here. And the ending, deflating I hated that, too. It did not work out how I expected it to and that was not so good! sometimes a change is always good but for me this one went too far.

I won't be going back for the next book

Jonathan Yen was good with the delivery of the story

10 of 11 people found this review helpful

Good, not great

Is there anything you would change about this book?

The narrator, Jonathan Yen, was terrible ... I found his voice made the characters unlikable. His rendition of women is horrible, making every woman sound like a whiny brainless twit. I should have read this in book form rather than listen to the audiobook.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

The ending is very disappointing.

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

No.

Any additional comments?

Not nearly as good as "The Life We Bury". It wasn't a bad story but it could have had a stronger ending.

7 of 8 people found this review helpful

Great book...

Allen Eskens is one of my new favorite authors! If you've not read "The Life We Bury" do yourself a favor and do so immediately. and 5he read this!

15 of 18 people found this review helpful

Just okay

Not nearly as good as Eskens "The Life We Bury". Although the story held my attention and there were several moments of true action and suspense there was just something choppy about the plot. Also, the narrator had a light touch for this type of story that I found distracted from the action.

25 of 31 people found this review helpful

Failed Noir, Failed Morality

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Jonathan Yen?

It was hard at times to distinguish a bad book from bad narration, but I got the consistent sense that our reader was doing an infomercial...or maybe a middle-school educational film. He over-enunciated, had little sense of the "drama" taking place, and seemed out of touch with the purported tradition/genre of the work. To be fair, the book is so bad that our reader might have been more effective with something else, but he didn't help.

Any additional comments?

I abide by a pretty strict Life’s Too Short to Finish Bad Books policy, but this one slipped through.

Yeah, the opening premise is promising – an accident unravels an old scheme predicated on identity theft – but it goes downhill rapidly.

For a time I thought I might learn something from this as a counter-example, but it is so ineptly done that it doesn’t even have that dubious virtue. The narrative, the voice, and the perspective are all, to put it simply, wrong. It switches from one tone to another in clumsy fashion, seeming to stagger toward a coherent conclusion. It features characters who attempt clever maneuvers to throw others off and then it shows the same characters making stupid, contrived choices. Supposedly insightful characters spend time (through an awkward point-of-view lens) in condescending asides explaining their motives and then, chapters later, act exactly opposite those motives.

If that isn’t bad enough, it has a 1980s slasher film morality, condemning violence at the same time as it revels in it, and punishing everyone for his or her sins with equal glee. It’s a conservative vision married to the amorality of noir, and it fails on both counts.

10 of 12 people found this review helpful

suspenseful and entertaining

I'm a new fan of this author and he always tells a good story. this story was a little generic in terms of the crime Etc. but it was still entertaining.

19 of 24 people found this review helpful