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McMinn and Cheese<a href="https://robmcminn.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/image-1.png" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"></a>I’ve read a little Japanese detective fiction before, so when I saw this on a list of recent reads posted by someone I follow on Bluesky, I thought I’d give it a try. It was my audiobook for the drive back from France at the weekend, and for a couple of days afterwards.A man staggers through the street, apparently drunk, and comes to rest at a statue on a bridge. It turns out he has a knife embedded in his chest. A team of detectives is put on the case, and their investigation quickly finds a lead suspect. It seems like an open and shut case, but one of the detectives is not so sure. This would be Detective Kaga, whose third outing this is. I haven’t read the previous two, but I don’t think it mattered. What follows is an enjoyable procedural, involving interviews and lots of legwork, with the lead detective always one step ahead of his partner, who is the reader’s proxy and asks all the puzzled questions. I was hoping for something a little different in terms of what I normally read, and there’s enough Japanese culture, religion, and even origami to satisfy.So: an enjoyable read, and I’ll probably follow up by looking for more by the same author.What I will almost certainly do, however, is avoid this particular audiobook narrator. I’m fairly satisfied that this was a real person, but if I tell you that I went to look him up to verify that, then you start to see the problem. Right from the off, I found his narration to be idiosyncratic: a little flat in places, and with an annoying habit of reading the reporting clauses in dialogue with a pause/beat long enough that the reporting clause seemed to belong to the subsequent speech act rather than the preceding one.‘What is the problem?’[beat]He said, in a tone of slight annoyance.I made that example up, but you get the idea. So that was one of the things that made me suspect I’d accidentally bought a book narrated by an AI. Needless to say, I have no intention of ever doing that. But there was enough modulation and characterisation elsewhere that I thought it probably was a real person.But the other thing that kind of screamed AI was a repeated glitch in the pronunciation of certain words. Here is a list:<ul><li>Confirmation</li><li>Situation</li><li>Station</li><li>Destination </li><li>Information </li><li>Imagination </li><li>Conversation </li></ul>You get the picture. With every single word with that ending, the narrator seemed to glitch, leaning too heavily on the ‘a’ sound in each word so that it almost added an extra syllable. It’s hard to describe, but it is irritating, and wierd, to the point that I am still half-suspicious that I was listening to an AI voice trained on this real actor’s voice.As I said, I enjoyed the book itself, but those two irritating glitches/habits kept throwing me out of it, so I’ll be avoiding ‘P J Ochlan’ in the future.<a href="https://robmcminn.uk/2024/11/06/a-death-in-tokyo-by-keigo-higashino-audiobook/" class="" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://robmcminn.uk/2024/11/06/a-death-in-tokyo-by-keigo-higashino-audiobook/</a><a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/audiobook/" target="_blank">#Audiobook</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/audiobooks/" target="_blank">#audiobooks</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/book-reviews/" target="_blank">#bookReviews</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/books/" target="_blank">#Books</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/crime/" target="_blank">#Crime</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/detective/" target="_blank">#detective</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/fiction/" target="_blank">#fiction</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/procedurals/" target="_blank">#procedurals</a> <a rel="nofollow noopener" class="hashtag u-tag u-category" href="https://robmcminn.uk/tag/reading/" target="_blank">#Reading</a>

Deadline“A Foundational Building Block”: The Procedural Is Back & Streamers Are Aboard – MIPCOM Scenesetters <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/News" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#News</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/GreysAnatomy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#GreysAnatomy</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/MIPCOM" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MIPCOM</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/MipcomCannes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MipcomCannes</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/MIPCOMScenesetters" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#MIPCOMScenesetters</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/NCIS" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#NCIS</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/NCISOrigins" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#NCISOrigins</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/Procedurals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#Procedurals</a> <a href="https://mastodon.social/tags/SaintPierre" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#SaintPierre</a><a href="https://deadline.com/2024/10/mipcom-scenestters-procedurals-greys-anatomy-ncis-1236115558/" rel="nofollow noopener" translate="no" target="_blank">https://deadline.com/2024/10/mipcom-scenestters-procedurals-greys-anatomy-ncis-1236115558/</a>

LorryWatching <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/police" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#police</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/procedurals" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#procedurals</a>, I think that if somebody were a <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/narcissistic" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#narcissistic</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/nutjob" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#nutjob</a> it would be much more interesting to try and see just how much evidence you could leave and still not get caught/prosecuted than it would be trying to plan a <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Perfect" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Perfect</a> <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Crime" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Crime</a> - Although now I say that; it does sound like what <a href="https://mstdn.social/tags/Trump" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#Trump</a> has been doing this last 50 years.

MetaFilterSmooth Criminal?In Ask Metafilter, Not A Thing is looking for skilful criminals criming skilfully: "Donald Westlake / Parker fans, what have you found that scratches a similar itch? I'm looking for something where a criminal is at the center of the story: no cops, wannabe cops or vigilantes. Like a police procedural, but for the other side."<a href="https://ask.metafilter.com/370154/Skilful-criminals-criming-skilfully" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://ask.metafilter.com/370154/Skilful-criminals-criming-skilfully</a><a href="https://mefi.social/tags/books" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#books</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/authors" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#authors</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/reading" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#reading</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/fiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#fiction</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/CrimeFiction" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#CrimeFiction</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/novels" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#novels</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/crime" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#crime</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/criminals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#criminals</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/DonaldWestlake" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#DonaldWestlake</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/procedurals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#procedurals</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/SmoothCriminals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#SmoothCriminals</a> <a href="https://mefi.social/tags/SuccessfulCriminals" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">#SuccessfulCriminals</a>

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