Argylle

A Novel

By: Elly Conway

Narrated by: Dakota Blue Richards

Length: 13 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher's summary

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The globe-trotting spy thriller that inspired the star-studded film Argylle, now streaming on Apple TV+, featuring Henry Cavill, Bryce Dallas Howard, Samuel L. Jackson, and John Cena, and directed by Matthew Vaughn of Kingsman trilogy fame

A luxury train speeding towards Moscow and a date with destiny.

A CIA plane downed in the jungles of the Golden Triangle.

A Nazi hoard entombed in the remote mountains of South-West Poland.

A missing treasure, the eighth wonder of the world, lost for seven decades.

One Russian magnate's dream of restoring a nation to greatness has set in motion a chain of events which will take the world to the brink of chaos.

Only Frances Coffey, the CIA's most legendary spymaster, can prevent it. But to do so, she needs someone special.

Enter Argylle, a troubled agent with a tarnished past who may just have the skills to take on one of the most powerful men in the world. If only he can save himself first...

©2024 Elly Conway (P)2024 Random House Audio

Bait & Switch

If you are expecting a glimpse at the movie coming out, an action comedy, you will be woefully dissapointed. The begining seems like a love letter to Russia. The narration awful and monotone. Location and time jumps that make absolutely no sense other than to move plot along.

I've never said this before, but I think the movie will be better than the book.

HARD PASS

Investigating if I can return and get a credit back.

Lack Luster Story; Awful Performance

The story was ok. The performance….was just terrible. Constant mispronunciations and a weird attempts to embody masculine military communications made the whole thing feel like an awkward high school production.

Odd narration

The narrator has very good accents, but mispronounced many words. After listening, I am fairly certain that Taylor swift did not write this book. I think the movie will be better than the book.

The performance was great and the details and character development was good but the story was predictable

That the book was nothing like what the movie will be

The fact that it was touted as the movie the book was based upon on

Wrong Narrator for the Story

While the author is clear that this book is work of fiction, and there may be mistakes…it doesn’t help that the dialect of a UK speaker is used in a story about an American institution. But then again, the author has written the dialect in the story and her ownership of the mistakes. By the way, I wouldn’t call a Marine who no longer serves an “ex-Marine”, ‘cause those are fighting words.

The narrator's pronunciation of many words was inexplicably awful.

Semper "Fee" ? "Saw" -viet Union? (And not in a cute foreign accent way; in a, wow, debut reading gig, huh? way) And so many other words were just flat out pronounced incorrectly. Each bizarre utterance was like nails on a chalkboard to me. It really ruined the overall experience for me. The story was just ok. It seemed to be written purposely so that it could easily be adapted to a TV script. Which, of course, it has. The main characters were cliche. Not much depth to them. Not terribly interesting. The "adventure" did not have me sitting on the edge of my seat. I'm pretty stingy when it comes to spending my Audible credits. I wish I had passed on this one. I fell victim to the hype. And there's no way this is a Taylor Swift novel. Too simple and shallow. Plus she'd never sign off on the poor performance.

It was fine, I guess

Relatively entertaining but very predictable story. The narrator was very distracting, inconsistently slipping into a pretty strong northeastern accent.

Horrible Narration

Please Audible!!! Stop allowing this type of narration. She was simply reading the text and mis-pronouncing so many words! Story would have been so much better if the narration had been. It was painful to listen to! I hope the author reads these reviews and asks that she not narrate her next novel.

Hard to listen

The story wasn't great. Too long. Hard to be interested in the characters. Narration was monotone and had an accent like Anna Delvey for every character.