Elisabeth Forrest and C. Steen wrote about this audiobook more than a year apart and objected to precisely the same scene, in almost the same words. Being chased by people with guns, both say, and stopping to talk about their feelings. When two strangers independently name an identical flaw without either having read the other, that carries more information than the 4.1 sitting above them.
Our Take on A Murder to Remember
Amelia Bennett is a Jane Austen fan who sneaks away from a dull tour of an English country manor and runs straight into a man more dashing than Mr. Darcy himself. Tom Calder is a charming aristocrat about to lose his ancestral home to family debts, and he invites his American guest to drink her way through the estate's priceless wine collection alongside him. They wake in his bed convinced they witnessed a murder in their drunken haze. The body has vanished. Nobody believes them. The shifting memories are the real device, and the copy is direct about it: on the run for their lives, the two of them have to reassemble a night neither can reliably recall while chasing down a string of baffling clues.
Machinist gave it two stars and produced the most quotable dismissal on the page: not the worst freebie on offer, but not any good either. Ridiculous and humorous are not the same thing, that response says. The mystery is not mysterious, the romance is not romantic, both main characters are dolts. The insult it settles on is the sort of kids' show found on Nickelodeon or Disney built from preposterous story lines and cringy overacting, which is unkind and not entirely unfair.
Cat Jameson is the counterweight, and every bit as emphatic: a delicious stew of romance and suspense packed with laugh-out-loud moments and genuinely insightful discussion about perspectives on life and living. If therapy were this much fun, that entry adds, everybody would be doing it. The very conversations Elisabeth Forrest and C. Steen could not tolerate are the conversations Cat Jameson turned up for. That is not a contradiction on the page. It is the decision a buyer has to make.
Why Listen to A Murder to Remember
Three of the five responses are describing a listening experience rather than a reading one, which in a column this size is worth pausing on. Michelle RB calls it charming and funny, full of banter, with some OMG moments and an overall great listen. C. Steen measures a decision to quit in hours of audio remaining rather than pages left. Cat Jameson, most tellingly of all, wishes it were possible to get this audiobook in print in order to go back and refer to it.
Brittany Pressley holds the sole credit for a book with an American lead, an English aristocrat, and an English country estate full of people worth being frightened of. One reader across ten hours and three minutes is carrying two national registers and a chase sequence, and this page says nothing beyond the name. What the credit does establish is that whatever variety the cast has, all of it comes from one person in one booth.
Michelle RB's five-star runs two sentences and hits the register exactly: charming, funny, great banter, some OMG moments, an overall great listen. That is the version of this book that works, and it is a real version. The murder is a device. The estate is a setting. The point is two people being funny at each other while something goes badly wrong in the woodlands around them, and for long stretches the book knows it.
What to Watch For in A Murder to Remember
Both dissenting responses circle the same structural fault. Elisabeth Forrest enjoyed the mystery but found far too much time given over to characters discussing their feelings, emotions and traumas, frequently in the middle of being chased by someone with guns. C. Steen frames it as one thing after another going wrong to the point of eye rolls, and then the same pause to rehearse various traumas, over and over. Two people, more than a year between them, one complaint.
Grade and body also disagree on one of them. Elisabeth Forrest opens with really three and a half stars, and the vote recorded beside it is a four, which means the number feeding that 4.1 is rounder and kinder than the sentences underneath it. Worth remembering whenever an aggregate on a page like this looks solid: some of the votes have already been rounded up by the people casting them. Machinist's word for the book is a freebie, incidentally, and the price field on this record carries nothing that would argue with it, which is context worth having when a rating comes from an audience that risked nothing to acquire the thing.
Vacation-fling comedy and gun-chase suspense do not share a natural tone, and the book asks you to hold both at once. Elisabeth Forrest raises something sharper about Amelia too: vapid and silly is the phrase, a well-educated nitwit, with the observation that even in a romance a female lead can be written as capable and intelligent. Cat Jameson describes the same character as an American textile preservationist, a detail that appears nowhere in the publisher's copy, which calls her only a Jane Austen fan.
Who Should Listen to A Murder to Remember
Comedy-first romance listeners who want banter and a plot that refuses to take itself seriously are the audience, and Michelle RB and Cat Jameson are the evidence it lands for them. Ten hours runs long for this register, and C. Steen's three remaining hours is the honest test to apply: if the emotional conversations are still working for you around hour seven, they will carry you to the end. Michelle RB's four words for it, charming, funny, great banter, amount to the honest product description this page never got around to writing. Sixteen votes have been cast and five carry words, so the aggregate is doing a lot of quiet work with very little visible reasoning behind it.
Leave it if you want a mystery that is genuinely mysterious, since even the enthusiastic entries treat the crime as scaffolding for everything else. Leave it too if characters processing trauma mid-chase would break the spell, because two separate listeners say that is exactly what happens and neither was persuaded otherwise. Cat Jameson wanted a printed copy to go back through, which is the strangest compliment in this column and probably the truest thing said about the book: better company than plot.
Who narrates the A Murder to Remember audiobook?
Brittany Pressley is credited alone for the ten hours and three minutes, which puts an American lead, an English aristocrat and the staff of a country estate in one pair of hands. Three of the five responses discuss listening rather than reading, and not one of them complains about the reading.
Is the mystery actually mysterious?
Barely, on most of the evidence here. A two-star response states flatly that the mystery is not mysterious and the romance is not romantic, and even the enthusiastic entries treat the vanished body as scaffolding for the banter. Arrive for two people being funny while something goes wrong around them.
Why do reviewers keep mentioning trauma conversations?
Because two of them found the same thing exasperating, more than a year apart. Elisabeth Forrest describes characters discussing feelings and traumas while being chased by someone with guns, and C. Steen describes the identical pause recurring. Cat Jameson enjoyed those exact passages, which makes them the deciding factor.
How long is the audiobook and does it hold up across that length?
Ten hours and three minutes from Audible Originals. One three-star response stopped with roughly three hours left, which puts the wobble somewhere near hour seven. If the emotional conversations still work for you at that point the rest will land, and if they already grate, the ending will not rescue it.
