This is the worst detective I have ever read or heard. I was a big fan of Dorothy L Sayers decades ago, but revisiting it in 2019 I am astonished that Audible could pay an actor enough money to persuade her to grind on to the bitter end. Jane McDowell reads it beautifully, but that is all that can be said for it. Of course, Lord Peter is insufferable; I suppose he is meant to be. So is Hercule Poirot, for that matter - but that is part of the joke. The novel is set in Devon, where everyone who isn't a toff is a comically idiotic bumpkin - unless, of course, they are are Jew or a Dago. And it is not just the characters in the novel who use this language - the author does too. The plot grinds its excrutiatingly labyrinthine way through 15 hours of minute-by-minute alibis, and then DOESN'T COME TO A CONCLUSION! You are told what the detective thinks probably happened, but nobody is called to account, and the story breaks off, to make way for fifteen minutes of utterly extraneous biography of Lord Peter by his uncle. Nothing to do with anything. Just like that. There are some limp arrests for conspiring to do something, but the characters agree that it is quite possible that nothing will come of it. And that is that.
A tip for anyone still tempted to listen to the book: at one point, the poor reader takes ten minutes to read out a page of code: "APOE WOIR POIWBN ISB OPQFIH PQGH KCKC etc etc" Fast forward through all of that. Then you have 15 minutes or so of code-breaking - fast-forward through that too. Nobody can follow it, nobody has ever been expected to follow it, and the reader deserves a medal.
Before I listened to this, I listened to all 35 hours of Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", and the time flew by.
This is the worst detective I have ever read or heard. I was a big fan of Dorothy L Sayers decades ago, but revisiting it in 2019 I am astonished that Audible could pay an actor enough money to persuade her to grind on to the bitter end. Jane McDowell reads it beautifully, but that is all that can be said for it. Of course, Lord Peter is insufferable; I suppose he is meant to be. So is Hercule Poirot, for that matter - but that is part of the joke. The novel is set in Devon, where everyone who isn't a toff is a comically idiotic bumpkin - unless, of course, they are are Jew or a Dago. And it is not just the characters in the novel who use this language - the author does too. The plot grinds its excrutiatingly labyrinthine way through 15 hours of minute-by-minute alibis, and then DOESN'T COME TO A CONCLUSION! You are told what the detective thinks probably 
happened, but nobody is called to account, and the story breaks off, to make way for fifteen minutes of utterly extraneous biography of Lord Peter by his uncle. Nothing to do with anything. Just like that. There are some limp arrests for conspiring to do something, but the characters agree that it is quite possible that nothing will come of it. And that is that.
A tip for anyone still tempted to listen to the book: at one point, the poor reader takes ten minutes to read out a page of code: "APOE WOIR POIWBN ISB OPQFIH PQGH KCKC etc etc" Fast forward through all of that. Then you have 15 minutes or so of code-breaking - fast-forward through that too. Nobody can follow it, nobody has ever been expected to follow it, and the reader deserves a medal.
Before I listened to this, I listened to all 35 hours of Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", and the time flew by.