Dark Places Audiobook by Gillian Flynn— narrated by Rebecca Lowman, Cassandra Campbell, Mark Deakins, and Robertson Dean

Why the audiobook wins

Dark Places splits into three voices and the audiobook gives each one its own reader. Libby Day in the present, her brother Ben across a single day in January 1985, and their mother Patty across the same hours. Hearing them separated does something the page cannot manage: the 1985 chapters stop reading as flashback and start running like a live broadcast alongside the investigation.

It matters most for Patty. Flynn's best writing here is a farm wife doing arithmetic that will not come out right, and given a voice of its own that thread becomes the tragedy the murder plot is wrapped around. Libby's chapters are the opposite pleasure. She is rude, light-fingered, and very funny about it, and a reader who commits to the meanness makes her far better company than she deserves to be.

Just under fourteen hours, and it is bleak the whole distance, which is worth knowing before you start a long drive with it. If Gone Girl brought you to Flynn, this is the darker book, and the cast recording is the way to take it. One Audible credit.