Hate makes people do terrible things.

James Holt is a genial, family-loving man with a wife he adores and two brightly thoughtful children: sounds like the perfect setting for a cozy. But James is a successful P.I. and in amidst the various other cases he encounters, one comes along which will prove both unusual and unexpectedly dangerous. Eva Miller was 83, beginning to become a little forgetful. When browsing through the pictures of an advertised art gallery exhibition, she sees a small painting by Monet and is certain she remembers seeing it once some time before. But this could not be possible, unless ... James Holt is employed to look into the provenance of the little picture, taking him and his wife to Germany.

The book is cleverly written, weaving present day with events from 1938 and 1950s Germany. Simply written, it focuses on character and family, although a!losing the events surely surrounding them to filter in. Unlike most P.I. stories, this one is mostly upbeat and positive. Narrator Nina Price does a fine job in further breathing life into the main protagonists with differentiated voicings for each one. The timbre of her voice is warm and pleasant, her reading conveying understanding with good inflection. However, she presents this reader with three problems when trying to give a star assessment: the first two are more a matter of taste, but the third is far more serious. Firstly, her reading is quite slow, requiring a speeding up of replay to 1.25, then later to 1.5. Then there is the problem of accents. Several of the characters are given German accents when they speak, and this is fine except (and here is the personal irritation) when they are talking, not in English, but to each other so, presumably, in German, their native language: they would not then have these obvious accents. Like old World War II movies where anyone who wasn't a native English speaker was given a caricature speech pattern, it bothered me. But these are points more personal to me. What is far more bothering was the total lack of recording editing in chapter 4, a section of 12 minutes 35 seconds. Words, phrases and on one occasion, a whole sentence/paragraph were repeated, sometimes more than once, as the narrator struggled to get it right. An interesting insight into how she performed, perhaps, but very destructive to the flow of the story. So much so, this reader almost abandoned the entire book at this point, but finally skipped to section five instead. Fortunately, this really poor state of affairs did not repeat.Sent

My thanks to the rights holder of Thieves, who, at my request, freely gifted me with a complimentary copy via Audiobook Boom. The central story, so painfully real, was treated with a delicacy rarely seen in books, and the characters were vibrant, believable. More for those readers who prefer the slight whimsy of cozy mysteries than hard edged detective work, this is still an enjoyable story of section 4 is skipped.

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