Five hundred and forty-four pages sit in the page-count field of this record. The runtime printed beside it reads two hours and thirty-one minutes. Those two numbers cannot both describe the same text, and no word anywhere on the listing says abridged. Establish that before you buy this audiobook, because Ann Rule's collections are built out of procedural detail, and detail is precisely what vanishes when a book is cut to a fraction of its length. Laural Merlington is the credited reader. Pocket Books is the imprint on file.
Set the two figures beside each other and the conclusion is not really in doubt. No voice reads five hundred and forty-four pages of anything in two and a half hours. So either this audio is a substantial abridgment nobody has labeled, or the page count and the ISBN belong to a print edition whose fields were welded onto an audio product, a reading the January 2001 release date and the Pocket Books imprint both support. A buyer genuinely cannot tell which, and the listing is perfectly content to leave it that way.
Rule's actual subject deserves stating plainly, because true crime is easy to caricature from outside. The headline case involves a marriage that looked complete from the street: a young wife rising inside a major computer company, a husband from a family building business, a small son, a good house. Underneath it ran drugs, sordid sex and con operations, with one of the pair an innocent and the other a manipulator without a conscience. The killing arrived suddenly. The prosecution took a decade to arrive at anything.
The Lieutenant Who Re-Opened the Case Reviews It
Buried in this column is something that is not a review at all. In July 2015 somebody filed five stars and identified as the lieutenant who re-opened the case, working it alongside two detectives for three hundred and sixty-five days across three years. That account reports the first conviction in the State of Washington obtained on circumstantial evidence, and adds that twenty-five years on, in its own words, we are still looking for the body. Rule wrote about that investigation. The officer who ran it turned up underneath the listing to confirm it happened.
Two hours and thirty-one minutes turns out to be a genuinely useful shape for this material, whatever its cause. True crime at full length has a habit of sagging in the middle, where an investigation stalls and the writer has to fill the months with something. A version cut close to the bone keeps only the turns, and Rule was always far better at the turn than at the filling. You can take this in a single sitting, which for a story about a marriage that was a performance is arguably the right way to meet it.
Laural Merlington's assignment here is compression. Names, jurisdictions, dates and the shape of a prosecution that ran for ten years all have to arrive intelligibly at speed, with none of the room a longer recording would allow for slowing down and letting a fact settle. That is a harder reading job than a novel of identical length, and it is the thing to listen for in the opening minutes: whether the procedural material stays clear while it is moving quickly.
Five Stars for a Book Not Yet Read
September 2016 produced a five-star response from somebody who had not read the book. That account mourns Ann Rule's death in 2015, praises her style, and then states it outright: I just received the books and have not begun to read them as yet. Five stars for an author, filed against a title, before opening it. Affectionate and entirely uninformative, and folded into the same 4.6 average that ninety-nine people have contributed to. Nothing about that grade is measuring this collection.
Affection for the author is doing most of the work across this column. Three entries here concern Ann Rule rather than Empty Promises: years of loyal reading, a great style now missed, exceptional characterizations, an instruction to pick up any one of her books and enjoy it. The warmth is real and well earned. It is also no help at all to somebody choosing between this collection and any other carrying her name, since not one word of it distinguishes them.
This record's publisher copy has been through a conversion and shows the seams. The opening line shouts about more than twenty million copies in print, with the words of and Ann fused into a single word, and quotes Kirkus calling Rule America's best true-crime writer. The closing line promises to leave listeners shaken. Somebody swapped one noun for an audio audience and left a print-sales boast standing three sentences above it. Small things individually, and together they tell you how much attention this listing has received.
Two and a Half Hours, Read by Merlington
True-crime regulars already know whether they want this one. A four-star from September 2024 makes the case for the author about as well as it can be made: years of reading, nobody measuring up on detail and research, an invitation to pick up any of the books and enjoy them. That same response misspells the name it is praising, which is oddly fitting on a page assembled this carelessly. If Rule is already your writer, two and a half hours is an easy yes.
First-time readers should be more careful. A first encounter with a writer ought to be with the writer's actual book, and until the abridgment question is settled nobody can promise this is one. Anyone who wants the procedural texture, the interview material and the trial detail should assume a short version cannot carry them. Ask the retailer whether the text is complete, and be prepared for the answer to be difficult to get. Ann Rule deserves better packaging than this, and so does anybody paying for it.
Is this audiobook abridged?
The listing never says either way, which is itself the answer you should act on. The imprint on file publishes print, the release date belongs to a paperback, and a page count sits in a field no recording would fill. Confirm with the retailer that you are buying a complete text, because nothing here confirms it for you.
How many cases does the collection actually contain?
The description details one at length, the marriage that ended in a killing and a prosecution spanning a decade, then refers to several further cases where the search for love brought only lies and betrayal, without counting or naming any of them. So the honest answer is one headline case plus an unspecified number of shorter ones.
Do I need to have read other Ann Rule books first?
Not at all. Each case stands alone, and the collection is drawn from her personal crime files rather than continuing anything earlier. Coming to her work for the first time here is perfectly reasonable, provided you first settle the question of whether this particular edition carries the full text of the book.
Who reads the audiobook, and what does true crime demand of a narrator?
Laural Merlington reads it. The genre asks for something specific: enough restraint that a real death is not performed for effect, and enough momentum that a procedural stretch does not go flat. At this compressed length the second demand is much the harder one, and the opening minutes will show you how it has been handled.
