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Couldn't put it down
Listened to the whole thing in almost only one sitting, it was so gripping. I had a hard time understanding some words, so I frequently had to check the e-book, but it didn't ruin the experience in the slightest. The voice actor was the perfect choice, though I had a hard time distinguishing between characters sometimes.
The story didn't waste any time for a single second, and despite never slowing down, I never had an issue with understanding what was going on. Loved both main characters and their chemistry, and the mystery was very engaging. I also laughed out loud at several well written and placed jokes, occasionally lifting but not distrupting the overall darker tone of the story.
MINOR SPOILER
The animated magpies on Crane's skin and around the house were adorable af, and the correspondence at the end made me chuckle at their gradually disappearing formalities.
Story itself is fun and I liked the dynamic between the two main characters.
HOWEVER.
Both Lucy Lennox and Michael Dean failed to put in the bare minimum effort to write and pronounce the foreign words and names used during the story correctly. As a native Hungarian speaker I found it frankly offensive how much Dean — a professional audiobook narrator — didn't even try to look up how to pronounce not only the Hungarian, but the French words too. I do not judge people for having an accent or struggling with a sound they didn't have a lifetime to get used to; put he didn't even bother to google the alphabet and figure out basic pronunciation rules. I googled the words and names he fumbled and it took me a minute each to find a site that provides recordings of native speakers.
My issue isn't only with how disrespectful this is towards both cultures; these mistakes also break the immersion completely. Both Falcon and King used to live in France, and King is a notorious art thief, so there's no fxcking way this guy didn't put an ungodly amount of work into sounding as close to native as possible (which we know he does because that's literally how he cons Falcon into releasing him in the first scene).
Not only that, but you mean to tell me that King — a supposed master of blending in — dated Elek Kemény [ˈɛlɛk ˈkɛmeːɲ] FOR TWO WHOLE YEARS and he speaks his native language that poorly?! Yeah, not buying it, completely threw me off.
I also have no idea how Lennox managed to fumble King's nickname during the translation process. You see King's criminal name is Le Chaton (which Dean btw pronounced La Chaton every single time) meaning kitten in French. The (supposed) Hungarian translation of this is also what Elek uses as a term of endearment for King.
Now I have no idea by what Lennox's process was here but she somehow arrived at macska [ˈmɒt͡ʃkɒ] (which Dean pronounced [ˈmɒʃkɒ] while narrating the native speaker, lmao) which just means cat. So somehow she found the French word for kitten, but not Hungarian. I have no idea how one manages that. Once again, just to make sure the information truly is easily accessible I googled “kitten in Hungarian”, and Google Translate itself immediately gave me cica [ˈt͡sit͡sɒ], the correct translation AND the only one we use as a term of endearment. No one calls their partner cat in English either, so this was especially perplexing to me, lol.
Conclusion: don't be sloppy when incorporating foreign cultures and their languages into your story, because it's disrespectful and embarassing.
MC is supposed to be an adult man with ADHD, but with how severely scatter-brained and naïve he is, he should be fxcking dead. I'd have no issue if it was just severe ADHD (I'm neurodivergent myself), but in that case dude would definitely need medication and constant assistance.
The whole mafia pops a boner from this guy after one lecture, and it's not even cute, just predatory and creepy. Like “oh how quirky and adorable this man is, just painfully oblivious, can't wait to spitroast him with my brother!”.