Melusina, one of five people who wrote in about this audiobook, files a five-star grade and then announces, inside the same review, "I give this book, a 7." Not seven out of ten. Not seven stars. A 7, docked for what the entry calls "the constant, legal barrage." It is a small contradiction, and it is also the most transparent number attached to Cruel Deception, because the badge sitting above the column is arithmetically impossible.
Just One Voice, No Cast or Dramatization
Morgan Reid was nine months old, in and out of hospitals since birth, and died of what looked like sudden infant death syndrome. The mother, Tanya, was a nurse and, by the copy's account, a devoted wife. Years later her son Michael, described here as "a boy who by all accounts was terrified of his mother," began showing signs of the same affliction. Munchausen syndrome by proxy followed, then a felony child abuse conviction, then a first-degree murder charge for Morgan. Gregg Olsen frames it as "a landmark trial that unfolded in a series of reversals," and the recording runs nine hours and thirty-two minutes.
Kevin Pierce reads it, and the credit is one line with nothing attached to it. In a book whose spine is trial transcript, medical record and courtroom reversal, the reader's work is mostly keeping a chronology legible: which hospital, which admission, which conviction, which child. That is a specialist skill and not the sort of thing publisher copy advertises. What the listing does establish is that no cast, no dramatization and no second voice is involved anywhere in the production.
Sherry P. lands the sharpest complaint in the column, and delivers it in the vocabulary of a printed book: "Evidently he had a requirement to get to a specific number of pages, because the number of times that every detail is repeated ad nauseam is ridiculous." That is a judgment on a manuscript's length, aimed at a recording with no pages in it. The same review objects to a formula the author keeps reaching for, "Without peer," on the grounds that everybody got the point the first time.
Detail Stacked on Detail Until It's Undeniable
True crime as a form rewards the very density Sherry P. resents. Kenh makes the same case more gently: the book is "incredibly repetitive But the ending was worth it," with a wish that it had been "cut down a bit." Length, then, is flagged twice in this column by two people who otherwise disagree about the book. In audio that objection changes shape. Repetition that grates on the page can steady a listener tracking two children, two convictions and a medical picture that keeps shifting, and the runtime is not a long haul for a case this tangled.
Nine hours and thirty-two minutes buys the whole account and not a digest, which is the whole argument for this recording over a shorter treatment of the same case. MD, writing in January 2026, states the appeal plainly: Olsen "writes well and tells a good story too," and this one "leaves more questions than answers." That single sentence is a recommendation and a warning at once. If you need a true-crime narrative to resolve, this trial will not oblige you.
Munchausen syndrome by proxy is named in the description, so the shape of the case is not withheld, and the description is candid about where the verdicts land. What it does not prepare you for is the texture. Olsen's method is accumulation, detail stacked on detail until the pattern is undeniable, and that accumulation is what two reviewers experience as repetition and a third as legal barrage. Anyone who came for psychology should know that procedure is the book.
Two Whole-Star Votes Cannot Average 4.4
Notorious USA LLC is the publisher on this listing, while the series field carries a different house's imprint altogether: St. Martin's True Crime Library. Both can be accurate, since backlist true crime changes hands and audio rights travel separately from print. But the two appear side by side with no word of explanation, and the series is given no number, so you cannot work out where this title sits in that library or whether the library is being invoked as a lineage or as a marketing label.
Verbena Brown's five-star response never discusses this book. It praises Gregg Olsen in general terms, reports that with his nonfiction "it's hard not to read at least twelve pages at a time," and hopes for more soon. Melusina's five-star entry drifts the same way, spending its closing lines on other Olsen titles, one of which "Was a masterpiece." Two of the highest grades in this column are therefore partly grades for a byline. Their timing is odd as well. Every written response arrived between March 2025 and March 2026, close to three years after the April 2022 release, with nothing at all in the years between. Something drove people to this title in a cluster, and the listing offers no clue what it was.
Nothing about the rating badge here survives inspection. It reads 4.4 and it reports two votes. Two whole-star votes cannot average 4.4 under any rounding convention, and five written responses sit directly beneath a counter claiming that two people participated. The grades you can actually see run five, four, five, five and three. Whatever population that badge is computing over, it is not the column printed underneath it.
Pierce's Unadorned Reading Suits Medical Records
Olsen completists and true-crime listeners who want the full procedural weight of a case will get it. The trial is the draw: reversals, a nurse in the dock, two children, and verdicts that arrive without making the why any clearer. Kevin Pierce's unadorned reading suits the material, since a case built on medical records does not want a performance laid over the top of it. The dual filing under biography and memoir on one side and mystery and suspense on the other is unusually honest for a true crime listing, because the book genuinely sits between a life story and a case study without committing to either. For a landmark trial told at full length, the runtime is fair.
Anybody who needs a tidy resolution should take the warning twice over, from MD and from the description itself, that this case leaves more questions than answers. Listeners allergic to repetition have two reviewers on record with that exact objection. True crime regulars will read both warnings as a description of the genre, not a fault.
Good to Know
Why does the rating show 4.4 from only two votes?
Because both figures cannot hold at the same time. A pair of whole-star grades has no way to land on 4.4, whichever rounding rule you apply, and the counter reports fewer participants than the page displays responses. What you can see is five, four, five, five and three. Trust the column, not the badge.
How graphic is the Cruel Deception audiobook?
The subject is the death of a nine-month-old and the near-death of her brother, handled through medical evidence and courtroom testimony instead of staged scenes. Reviewers call it a hard book with heavy legal detail, and none describes gratuitous violence. The distress is clinical and cumulative, which for many listeners is worse.
Will the audiobook tell me why Tanya Reid did it?
Not to everyone's satisfaction. The description promises a look at her own troubling childhood and the secrets behind the case, but MD writes that it leaves more questions than answers and calls the whole thing hard to understand. Olsen documents the trial exhaustively; motive stays roughly where the court left it.
