As part of LibraryThing's wonderful Early Reviewers program, I was able to get a copy of Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller. You probably know Hugh Laurie as "House", from the TV show. He's also a musician (has a blues CD out), and, apparently, a novelist as well.
I was initially surprised to find it was an audio book; I thought it was going to be a physical copy of the book. This is actually my first audiobook, I've never done one before, so take my review with a grain of salt.
Thomas Lang is a former Scots Guard member. Offered money to assassinate someone, he declines, and proceeds to warn the target. From there, things start to go wrong in a no-good-deed-goes-unpunished sort of way. The early part of the book feel very much like a typical gumshoe novel, there's beautiful women, guns, spies, all the trappings of a good adventure novel.
Simon Prebble provides the voice, a great "upper crust" English accent, which is fun. Laurie's plotting is also fun. Thomas Lang is the wisecracking type. About every third sentence has some kind of snark, joke, sarcasm or witticism. I found it amusing for about 3 chapters, but when in the 4th chapter of a book, every other sentence has some bad joke in it, it becomes a bit much. I wasn't quite sure whether this was intended tongue-in-cheek or not, but in the end it became tiresome. This may be due to the audiobook format; in written form it might not have been annoying. Lang tends to talk in parenthetical remarks - I think there was one sentence that had a parenthetical remark inside a parenthetical remark. It was often hard to follow in audio form - again, it may simply be the Laurie's style doesn't translate well to audiobooks.
In the end I think this is a book I'd rather read than listen to, but it was entertaining.
