Audiobooks: Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum Series, read by Lorelei King

I quite like serendipity, so I was happy to learn last night that there’s a new Stephanie Plum YouTube video out – Stephanie Plum’s 12 Days of Christmas. I’ll be putting the video at the end of this post, but where does the serendipity come into play, you might be asking? It’s serendipitous (what a word! I’ve always wanted to use it somewhere) because I’ve been meaning to write about the audiobook versions of the Stephanie Plum series for a while now.

I used to devour all the Stephanie Plum mysteries, back when the series was relatively new, but somewhere along the line, they lost their sparkle for me. I’m not sure what it was – they continued to be funny, and each one definitely made me laugh, but something seemed to be missing. So for a while there, I stopped reaching for the latest and newest Stephanie Plum.

That is, until I discovered the audiobook versions read by Lorelei King.

This past summer, my family and I rented a beach house in Nova Scotia. It was a 19 hour drive there, and since I, unfortunately, can’t read in the car, I decided to give audiobooks a try. I wanted something familiar, and funny, but with a bit of a mystery; I decided that Stephanie Plum might just fit the bill. So Seven Up, Eleven on Top and Twelve Sharp accompanied me on the long drive there and back.

I was delighted to discover that the Stephanie Plum series works well in audio. King is the perfect reader for the series. I had absolutely no problems believing she actually was Stephanie Plum, and she performs the New Jersey accents for the secondary characters incredibly well. The audiobooks had me in stitches – there were many occasions on the drive when I would burst out laughing and everyone would say, “What? What are you listening to, Mom? Can I listen too? What’s so funny?”

Of course, most of the humour isn’t meant for little ears. But Stephanie Plum definitely made the 19-hour drives fly by for me. Not only that, but my husband, who isn’t much of a fiction reader and uses his iPod only for music, decided to give them a try too. And when he did, it was my turn to go, “What? What part are you on? What’s so funny? Is it Grandma Mazur? It is Grandma Mazur, isn’t it?”

So when I got back home, the first thing I did was get my hands on more of the audiobooks. Somehow, listening to them had brought back that sparkle for me – they were so entertaining. But I also discovered what a big difference the reader of an audiobook can make; I listened to High Five, which has a different narrator, and after having been regaled by Lorelei King all those hours, it just wasn’t the same (not to mention, the version I listened to was abridged. I just don’t get abridged audiobooks, really …)

King makes me believe she is Stephanie Plum, and that makes all the difference, I think, when it’s an audio version of a novel that’s written in the first person.

And now, here’s Stephanie Plum’s 12 Days of Christmas – a perfect way to end this post, I think!