Newlyweds Mac Smith & Annabel Reed find themselves caught up in two remarkably similar murders: one in Washington D.C.’s glorious National Cathedral & the other in a village church in England’s Cotswold region.
Murder at the National Cathedral by Margaret Truman. Book # 10 in the Capital Crimes series. Read by Rene Auberjonois. Published by Random House, 1993. First published in 1990. Abridged, 3 hours.
I will be 100% honest with you. I bought this audiobook because Rene Auberjonois narrated it. I have loved that man for a long time. He is a very talented actor. I always enjoy his work. When I saw this lonely cassette tape audiobook at the used book store one day, and saw who the narrator was, I snatched it up. I didn’t care who the author was, or what the plot was. I bought it without even looking. Luckily, I like both new and old tech and while now days I mostly listen to audiobooks on one of my streaming apps through blue tooth speakers or on my phone, I also have a portable cd player and a cassette player sitting on the bookshelf with my collection of old cd and cassette audiobooks. I have no problem listening to a cassette, as long as it doesn’t break. Because I had misplaced my old cassette player when rearranging all my books, I recently had to buy a new cassette player. -.- To test out it out, I grabbed this quick little audiobook and popped it in.
Murder at the National Cathedral is from a series I had never heard of before. A series based on capital crimes in Washington D.C. isn’t really my type of thing. Even though this book was 10 books in to a series, I had no problem following along with the murder mystery part of the book, but I was a little confused by a side plot about a movement called World of Peace. It seemed to take up a lot of the story but ended up having nothing to do with the main murder. 
Maybe because my audiobook was abridged, and I didn’t get the full story…? It just felt like there were a lot of set up that didn’t really amount to anything other then to be distracting. It was kind of vague and there was a lot of time spent talking about it without really getting any details about why it was a big deal or what was wrong with it. Also, when we got to the end and it was to be revealed who the murder was and why they did it… it happened so fast it felt kind of like too abrupt of an end. Sometimes it felt like the author wanted to just show off how well she knew locations in D.C. instead of making a tight plot with a captivating story. It wasn’t a terrible story, but it feels kind of like forgettable fluff. It had potential but just didn’t get there.
Rene’s performance narrating the story was top notch. He really has such a great voice. It’s soothing yet commanding. Rene really is a talented actor. I think I could listen to him read anything and it would sound good. I doubt I would have liked this story as much as I did if someone else had been narrating it.
Murder at the National Cathedral was ok. Too many vague false starts kept it from reach it’s full potential. Not a terrible book thanks to the performance by Rene Auberjonois. Mostly just kind of meh.
Creature From The Book Lagoon 