THE PARIS DIVERSION

Mozhan Marnò's performance of the latest installment in Chris Pavone's Kate Moore series is perfection. Her voice is beautiful, her French pronunciation expert, her foreigners speaking French with bad accents ditto. Pavone has a lot of backstory to fill in, which makes for a discursive setup, but Marnò creates tension and pace with attention to expression, personality, and background colors, and just listening to her change voices with the subtlest of inflections is entertainment aplenty. The plot, once it gets up to speed, is propulsive. There's a bomb at the Gard du Nord, a suicide bomber at the Louvre, and an American Master of the Universe on the brink of a huge market-making deal is about to have a seriously bad day. A multifaceted pleasure. B.G. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine [Published: JUNE 2019]