A buyer named Cynamumr came to this audiobook in the same month it went on sale and left the only critical response it has: three stars, under the headline "Not the first three books." The body explains itself. "As many on Audible have mentioned, we start with book three, go to book two and then who knows what." The description sitting directly above that sentence reads: "The first three books in the Irish Village Mystery series are included in this edition." Both statements are published on the same page, and the page makes no attempt to reconcile them.
Lennon's Reading Praised Even Inside a Complaint
Nothing else on the record adjudicates the dispute. The set runs twenty-nine hours and fifty-five minutes, just under ten hours apiece across three novels, and the copy lays them out in the sequence you would expect: Murder in an Irish Village, then Murder at an Irish Wedding, then Murder in an Irish Churchyard, each with a clean one-paragraph summary. What a description cannot do is tell you what order the files actually play in. One buyer says the answer is not the one printed, and no later response returns to the question.
Cynamumr is careful about where the fault lies, and the sentence deserves quoting because it is the only line anywhere on this page that touches the recording: "no problem with the writing or performance - just production!" That is a direct verdict on Caroline Lennon's reading, delivered by the single dissatisfied customer, and it is favorable. The grievance attaches to sequencing and to a release date that "kept being pushed back for the preorders," not to anything that happened in a booth.
The other two responses are warm and short. Linda Wiese calls the stories "delightfully written and hilarious" and adds, simply, "I love them." BJ, filing under the headline "Easy to listen to when traveling," reports a taste for Irish novels and notes that "the series follows the same family." Between them they describe the appeal accurately: comfort crime with a household at the center of it, portable enough to survive interruption. Nine people voted, three of them wrote, and the displayed average is 4.7. Cynamumr's own word for the novels, incidentally, is "cozys," which is at once a misspelling and an exact genre placement.
Siobhán Grows From Amateur Sleuth to Officer
Siobhán O'Sullivan is twenty-two and running her family's bistro in Kilbane, County Cork, when a man turns up dead at one of her tables with a pair of scissors protruding from his chest. It is the whole engine of book one, and it sets the pattern: a young woman with too many dependents, a village small enough that everybody is a suspect, and a murder landing in the middle of the family business. The description calls her feisty and redheaded: precisely the register the series works in.
Book two moves the trouble outdoors. Siobhán and her five siblings are catering a celebrity wedding when the best man is found murdered in the woods, a nicely cruel escalation: now the family's livelihood is the crime scene. Book three changes her standing altogether. She has "accepted her calling" and joined the Garda Síochána, and her first case brings Macdara Flannery back into her life. Taking three novels in sequence lets you watch an amateur turn into an officer, which is the actual reward of buying a bundle over a single.
Twenty-nine hours and fifty-five minutes is the practical argument for it. Three full-length cozy mysteries in one purchase, one reader across all of them, and a continuous cast, so you never have to rebuild your bearings between books. BJ's headline names the use case exactly: travel listening, the kind you can leave and come back to without losing the thread. The murders supply the structure and are not the point; the point is the O'Sullivan household, which is why the series survives being taken three at a time.
Nobody Has Confirmed the Sequencing Fix, Either
The sequencing complaint is the thing to verify before spending money. Cynamumr's account is specific and dates from the month of release: the bundle allegedly opens on book three, drops back to book two, and then becomes unpredictable. Whether that was corrected in the years since is exactly what this page cannot tell you, because no later response mentions the order at all. Linda Wiese and BJ, both writing in 2025, are silent on it: weak evidence of a fix and no evidence at all of the reverse. The frustration itself is on the record too: a release repeatedly pushed back for preorders that then, by this account, shipped in the wrong sequence anyway.
Two smaller gaps are worth naming. The copy ends its third summary on a trailing ellipsis instead of a hook, so the volume that changes Siobhán's whole situation is the one least sold to you. And nowhere does the page break the running time down: you get a single figure for the set and no way to know whether the three novels are evenly matched or whether one of them runs noticeably short. On a purchase this large, per-title runtimes would not be an unreasonable thing to publish. The individual novels carry no publication years anywhere on the page either. March 2022 is the only chronology on offer, and it belongs to the package rather than to any of the three books inside it.
Cozy Fans Who Read for the Household
Cozy mystery listeners who read for the household rather than for the puzzle are the ones this rewards. If you enjoy a series whose recurring pleasure is watching a family argue, cook, and cover for each other while somebody investigates a corpse, the bundle hands you three consecutive helpings of exactly that. It also suits anyone who wants a single voice for a long stretch, since Caroline Lennon carries all three novels and the only reviewer to comment on the performance had nothing bad to say about it.
It is a poor fit for listeners who want their crime fiction hard or their prose ambitious; Linda Wiese's chosen word is "hilarious," not incisive. It is a worse fit for anyone who cannot tolerate meeting a series out of sequence, because that is the specific accusation this edition carries. Twenty-nine hours is a lot to commit to a running order that one buyer reports arrived scrambled and that nobody since has confirmed either way.
Before You Listen
Are the three novels in this audiobook bundle presented in the right order?
One buyer, writing in March 2022, says no: the set opens on book three, moves back to book two, and then becomes unpredictable. That same response claims other customers had reported the identical problem. No later reviewer mentions the running order at all, so the page cannot confirm whether the sequencing was ever put right.
Which three novels does the bundle contain?
The description names Murder in an Irish Village, Murder at an Irish Wedding, and Murder in an Irish Churchyard, the opening three of the Irish Village Mystery series. All three follow Siobhán O'Sullivan in Kilbane, County Cork, and by the third she has joined the Garda Síochána, so taking them together tracks a genuine change in her standing.
Does this audiobook work if I have never read Carlene O'Connor before?
Yes, provided the order problem does not affect your copy. Book one introduces Siobhán, her five siblings and the bistro from scratch, and assumes nothing. If the set really does start on book three, you would meet Macdara Flannery as a returning figure before ever witnessing that arrival, which spoils the first two mysteries.
Does anyone comment on the narration of this audiobook?
The only person on the page to raise the subject is the reviewer who left three stars, and the verdict is that neither the writing nor the performance is at fault, only the production. Caroline Lennon is credited for all twenty-nine hours and fifty-five minutes. Beyond that one sentence, the column offers no assessment of the reading.
