One more BBC play for now, Sara Paretsky’s Killing Orders. I downloaded this largely because Kathleen Turner was portraying V.I. Warshawski, and there are much worse ways to kill a half-hour drive than listening to Kathleen Turner. (Also, it was a nice change to listen to actual American voices; both Whose Body? and Death on the Nile had British actors with bad American accents.)
The adaptation and the story aren’t quite up to their star. The adaptation leaves out some important details—such as, oh, precisely what happens to the main bad guy. I also found the narration, which was more like an internal monologue than a voiceover, to be occasionally distracting. Does the text have so very many descriptions of her clothes, and even if it does, do we have to faithfully preserve every single one of them? (It also includes conversations with her dead mother, and it’s not clear whether they’re supposed to be actual or imaginary.)
The story itself was written in 1985 and is the third V.I. Warshawski novel. It starts with V.I.’s detested aunt calling her for help, having been accused of forging stock certificates. This turns out to be part of a fairly complicated conspiracy involving both the Mafia and the Catholic Church, which I found slightly over-the-top. (V.I. and the people around her also take some serious damage during the book; I don’t know if that’s typical of the series.) It’s telling that I haven’t bothered to see if the library or a local bookstore has a copy of the text that I could browse to learn the details that the adaptation left out.
Not a terrible way to pass the commute, but I won’t be seeking out further V.I. Warshawski adaptations.