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The Quiet Game is the first book in the Penn Gage series. He is a prosecutor turned author, turned detective (kind of). I thought the mystery in the Quiet Game was really compelling, but the audiobook narrator kind of took away from the story. He did about 3 or 4 of the voices well, but all of the other voices sounded comically bad. He could not do a woman's voice at all. And the story is a serious one, so it was distracting. But if you could get past the bad female and secondary character voices, you can't help but get sucked into the story.

There is a decades old civil rights murder in this small southern town. It is a cold case and because of some meddling from a journalist and some help from Penn Gage, the case is about to get re-opened. There are national forces involved and the whole thing gets crazy really quickly. It was a pretty good murder mystery and there was a lot of legal stuff going on. Most of the legal aspects of the story were accurate, but some of the trial parts were a bit sensationalized. But nothing too bad.

The story is very light on the romance (but that might change later in the series) and very heavy on the action. It made for a very fast paced read and the audiobook listening flew by. I listened to the whole thing on a one day car trip. Everyone in the car liked the story and it was engaging enough and interesting to make everyone want to keep listening. I think this would be a better book to read, because the characters were interesting and the mystery was really well done. I didn't really like any of female characters, but there were plenty of male characters to like. If you like action packed murder mysteries with a strong male lead, check out the Penn Gage series.

 This review was originally posted on Book Briefs