Fundraising the Dead
By Sheila Connolly A Museum Mystery, Book 1
Narrator Robin Miles10 hrs and 38 mins.
Audible Studio's
Narrator Review of Robin Miles
It was flat and tasteless without a narrator reading it. It loses so much impact and dimension. Nuances are missing, intonations are zero, and my eyes are moving faster than my brain can create a visual.
I turned on the audio book and followed along with the lovely reading by Robin Miles. What I was hearing was intent, emotions, dramatizations and flavor that only comes with an audio book and a great narrator. I heard fifty shades of sound that just are lacking in flat one dimensional text. It's unimaginable to me to read a book, unless there were no other alternative.
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| Sheila Connolly |
Nell Pratt, is a professional beggar of funds for the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society, and she is good at it. She has organized a gala event to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the society, with two hundred of the crème de la crème of Philadelphia's richest and most influential people invited.
Nell is frantic with the long list of things that still need attending to before the party starts in just a few hours, when an enraged Marty Terwilliger, storms into Nell's office demanding immediate attention. Marty Terwilliger, member of the board, and contributor of the vast and important donation of the Terwilliger papers, is not someone to be casually dismissed. Some valuable Washington letters are missing from the collection and she knows she saw them very recently, and she wants to know where they are.
Nell's not sure why Marty had come to her with this and not Latoya Anderson, vice president of collections or even Charles Worthington, president of the Society. After promising to see what she can do while easing her out the door, she hurries to Alfred Findley's, cubicle. Alfred knows more about the collections than anyone else at the foundation and has been entering everything into a computer database for the entire fifteen years that he's worked there.
Alfred reveals that he had for some time thought items have gone missing from the collections, and although he's given monthly accounts to Latoya every month, nothing has been done about it. Meg is shocked and upset and vows to herself that she will look into it and ask Alfred to make a list of everything he thinks has gone missing. Alfred says he'll stay overtime and leave a copy on her desk so she can have it the next day.
Good to his word Alfred creates the list and Nell later catches sight of him at the party and knows he must want a few words with her but she can't talk to him while schmoozing with the guests. Later she notices Alfred is gone and she doesn't see him again till the following morning, dead in a pool of blood. Horrified, Nell, calls 911 and the wheels of justice begin to turn.
Nell's missing items list is on her desk as promised, it's long and all are very desirable and priceless items. She recognizes their value, but not to their full amount she goes on the internet to research them. The round figure she gleans from her research is alarming, Nell gets an unsettling feeling that Alfred's death is suspiciously related to the missing items. Although the police have deemed it an accidental death.
My favorite part of the book is when Nell, Marty and Marty's friend Elizabeth Farnsworth, (Libby to her friends,) conspire to trap the thief with a very devious and amusing plan. I had to laugh out loud when this trio of crafty and foxy women get together to lay out the groundwork for their cunning plot. Alfred's death, and the missing Washington letters, lead to major changes in Nell's life and a new romance with the dashing cousin of Marty's, a special agent for the F.B.I., James Morrison (Jimmy).
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