REVIEWED by ALEXANDER
TITLE: Dirty Little Secret
AUTHOR: Freddy MacKay
PUBLISHER: Mischief Corner Books
LENGTH:2 hours, 16 minutes
NARRATOR: Michael Pauley
RELEASE DATE: October 28, 2016
BLURB:
Erik decides geocaching is the best way to heal himself after work and personal problems overwhelm him, but the trip goes horribly wrong. Falling down the side of a mountain deters Erik’s plans for a quick cache find, but his rescuer is the one person who may be able to save Erik in more ways than he can imagine.
REVIEW:
The basic premise of the story was appealing, and this isn’t the first time that I have read about geocaching, an activity that is best left to clever outdoorsy types, and I really wanted to like Erik and Jonas, and even felt indignant at how people were treating Erik for his part in the affair, but as the story unfolded, I got more and more irritated with them both for taking the lack of communication trope too far.
There were two elements of the story that just didn’t work for me, but I will only share one..the one that really irritated me. If a person has an affair, regardless of whether they knew that the other person was married or not, the full weight of the blame should not, cannot be the burden of the one person. This is exactly what happened in Dirty Little Secret with Erik. It seriously drove me mutes to keep hearing how it was “all his fault” when seriously, it takes two to tango, and the adulterer must (I almost used caps there) take some of the blame.
I am sad to admit that I was disappointed with the narration by Pauley. Where I would have expected the sound of despair from Erik, I got melodrama. The character voices were slightly different, but just didn’t fit the characters as well as they could have. Now on the technical side, Pauley did come through for the most part with clear diction and a good pace, although the aforementioned melodrama could have been curbed by eliminating some of the awkward “à la Shatner” pauses.
The end result was an audiobook that I sadly cannot recommend for either the story or the audio performance.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: