People who follow me on Facebook and this blog will know that I am a fan of Jean Rabe’s. She's a generous and wise person and a good and caring friend. But she is also, at her core, a damn fine writer of popular fiction with a well-honed power of description of both people and places that elevates her work above the crowded field of stories on offer out there. Right now she is on a blog tour touting the audiobooks of three of her four (so far) Piper Blackwell Mysteries. So I asked her to drop by and offer her thoughts on discovering the thrill of an author hearing her work beautifully narrated.

So...ladies and gentlemen...Jean Rabe.

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Spencer County’s Fancy Frosting

by Jean Rabe

I hadn’t thought much about it, having an audiobook, when I wrote my first mystery, The Dead of Winter. A freelance editor approached me with the notion, said he’d handle it, and that he had a narrator in mind. Okay, I said, let’s go with it.

The narrator was the most magnificent Catherine Wenglowski.

I watch The Holiday Baking Championship on the Food Network. I am AMAZED at what a group of talented bakers can make … works of art, really. (I am also amazed that they would put that much time and effort into something that would be cut up and eaten … seems like a waste, eh?) Anyway, to my point: sometimes they frost their concoctions with this stuff called “mirror glaze.” It’s bright, shiny, smooth, and pours over a cake or cookies seamlessly.

Catherine’s voice is mirror glaze—bright, shiny, perfect, smooth.

When some of my friends heard my first audiobook, they looked up other things Catherine had recorded so they could buy more. To them, it wasn’t about the story …it was about her voice.

Apparently, Catherine liked Sheriff Piper Blackwell enough to record the next two books in the series: The Dead of Night and The Dead of Summer. All three are featured as part of this blog tour. Yeah, I read the books over and over as I was writing them. And now I’ve listened to them multiple times because she brings Spencer County to vivid, shiny life.

I feel incredibly fortunate that the editor suggested I take The Dead of Winter to audiobook form. I wouldn’t have done it without that nudge … and I wouldn’t have gotten to hear the most magnificent Catherine Wenglowski narrate the adventures of Piper Blackwell.

Before this experience, I’d only listened to two other audiobooks. One a Robert Crais novel (have to love Elvis and Joe), and the other one of my Rogue Angel adventures. Neither were as good … oh, the books might have been. But they didn’t sound as good. I hadn’t purchased more audiobooks because those two hadn’t been TERRIFIC. Once in a while I have Alexa play something Patrick Stewart narrated … but that’s not the same thing as an entire audiobook.

If I’d had heard a book earlier by Catherine or someone as talented, I certainly would not have stopped with Roger Crais and Rogue Angel. It’s nice to sit back and have someone tell you a story. I finally ‘get’ why people appreciate audiobooks.

Steven Paul Levia, who is graciously hosting this blog post, was fortunate with his audiobook, Creature Feature, which was narrated by actors Seamus Dever and Juliana Dever, who were on the Castle television series. I’ve listened to that one twice, and will again during the Thanksgiving weekend.

I’ll also listen to my Dead books again, hearing Spencer County, Sheriff Piper Blackwell, and Deputy Oren Rosenberg reflected in the mirror glaze.

It’ll be grand to curl up next to the fireplace with a few dogs, a blanket, and listen to Catherine pour the fancy frosting over Spencer County, Indiana.

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Piper Blackwell is the newly appointed sheriff in this intense mystery-thriller series set in a small town in Indiana from Faust Lifetime Achievement winner, Jean Rabe. Narrator Catherine Wenglowski lends her voice to this series of books that will keep you up at night...

About the Books

BUT FIRST! I hasten to remind you that on Amazon if you buy the ebook you can get the audiobook for around half off. What a deal! Sometimes it's fun to read and hear the words simultaneously. I recommend it. So check out the PIPER BLACKWELL MYSTERY SERIES! I bet you won't hate me for suggesting it.

THE DEAD OF WINTER

In a deceptively peaceful county, a murderer hides in plain sight.

Fifty-eight minutes into her first day on the job, 23-year-old Sheriff Piper Blackwell is faced with a grisly murder, the victim artfully posed amid decorations on his lawn. Drawing on former military training, Piper must prove herself worthy of the sheriff's badge, and that won't be easy.

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Length: 8 hr 47 min

Language: English

THE DEAD OF NIGHT

As Sheriff Piper Blackwell rushes to a clandestine meeting with an aging, paranoid veteran who believes spies are trailing his every move, she is caught in a fierce thunderstorm. Pounding rain drums against the bluff, washing away the earth and revealing a grisly secret someone tried to bury a long time ago.

Putting a name to the skeleton on the bluff, and searching for the thief who robbed the old veteran of his life’s earnings, sends Piper delving into the sleepy towns that dot her rural county. Now she’s digging into pasts perhaps best left alone.

Accompanied by Chief Deputy Oren Rosenberg, Piper seeks to expose a truth someone wants to remain forever hidden. The investigation may have started with a thunderstorm, but Piper aims to finish it and find justice. Uncovering fragments of Spencer County’s history could prove more dangerous - and deadlier - than she ever expected.

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Length: 8 hr 32 min

Language: English

THE DEAD OF SUMMER

Shouts of delight turn to screams of terror when a carnival ride goes berserk at the Spencer County Fair. Sheriff Piper Blackwell must contain the chaos and investigate the possible sabotage, even as she tries to solve a local businessman’s horrific murder.

But managing two investigations with at least one killer on the loose pushes the young officer and her tiny staff to their limits. Can Piper catch the murderer, or will the summer’s body count continue to rise?

Genre: Mystery/Thriller

Length: 8hr 19 min

Language:English

About the Author

USA Today Bestselling author, Jean Rabe's impressive writing career spans decades, starting as a newspaper reporter and bureau chief.

From there she went on to become the director of RPGA, a co-editor with Martin H. Greenberg for DAW books, and, most notably, Rabe is an award-winning author of more than forty science fiction/fantasy and murder-mystery thrillers.

She writes mysteries and fantasies because life is too short to be limited to one genre--and she does it with dogs tangled at her feet because life is too short not to be covered in fur.

Find out more about her at www.jeanrabe.com

About the Narrator

Catherine Wenglowski is a New York City-based audiobook narrator. With a background in theater and as a classically trained singer, combined with her lifelong love of reading, Catherine uses her trained ear and creativity to add breath and life to characters and to connect with her audience. Visit her website at: https://www.wenglowvo.com/

Death made nature’s lights less bright. 

—from The Dead of Summer

One of the great strengths of Jean Rabe’s writing, among many, is her ability to immerse a reader in a scene or moment. It could be a loud and action-filled moment, or a quite and contemplative one, it doesn’t matter. Rabe’s art here is to wrap you in the sights and sounds surrounding, and the feelings and perceptions surging through, the character whose point-of-view is dominating the moment.

This strength is beautifully on display in the first chapter of Rabe’s recently published third Piper Blackwell mystery, The Dead of Summer.

Piper, the very young Sherriff of Spencer County, Indiana, is taking the day off and enjoying the county fair with her boyfriend when disaster strikes in the first sentence. Suddenly the air is filled with sounds of metal torturing metal, fairgoers screaming out in horror or calling out for help. Piper’s body moves fast toward the trouble as her mind races to try to comprehend what has happened. The sights, sounds, and smells of a county fair take on a surreal quality, but a darkly serious one, and the reader feels this deeply, becoming not just an observer but a participant. 

One is tempted to call Rabe’s writing here cinematic, but it is far deeper and more textured than that. After all, inscribed fiction, whether poetry or prose, was the first virtual reality. The reading of a good translation of Homer’s The Illiad will convince you of that.

In The Dead of Summer, Rabe has fully matured into an author of mysteries. In the past Rabe concentrated on writing science fiction and fantasy, but, being a lover of mysteries, she always wanted to try her hand at this more “realistic” genre. So Rabe studied the genre to see what made good mystery novels work. She was an astute student. But what is best about her three Piper Blackwell mysteries is not the situations, the plot, the characters, or the puzzles—although all are contenders—but the exceptional artistry of her prose. It’s her intelligent, possibly instinctual, shaping of this virtual reality through the manipulating of words on a page, making the etherial tactile and the psychological palpable, that I celebrate.

But to what end?  To characters who become flesh and blood; to situations that become immediate; to doubts, resentments, passions, anger, puzzlements, anxieties, pride, that become the reader’s in the trick of empathy that the best of fictions can conjure. 

You don’t need to read the first two Piper Blackwell mysteries to read The Dead of Summer. But why would you deny yourself that pleasure? 

You can find Jean Rabe's Piper Blackwell Mysteries in ebook and paperback at Amazon.

And you can introduce yourself to Jean through her blog.

SUMMER IS ALMOST OVER—FOR PETE'S SAKE HURRY UP!