The Hermit Kingdom

De: Nick Thacker

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

Duración: 9 h y 59 m

Resumen del Editor

Shane Riley, ex-Australian Special Forces, is a retrieval specialist.

People want something, and he finds it, no matter where it is. He works for rich power brokers, collectors, black market dealers, and anyone willing to pay the right price.

He only has one rule: he does not retrieve people.

He gets interrupted on an offshore dive, and the two men requesting his presence bring him to a rich politician in South Korea, who wants his help.

His daughter’s been taken by a government entity in North Korea, and he wants Shane to get her back.

Shane balks, citing his “one rule,” but this time the South Korean man knows exactly what will entice him to help. His daughter, he claims, was trying to contact Shane’s wife before she was taken.

...Shane’s wife — who was murdered a year ago.

Not your best Mr Thacker

Terrible narration. Apart from the “dash” punctuation being spoken out, the virtual voice had no tonal inflections, so to follow who was speaking one needs the “he said/she said”. No excited pitch indicating a tense moment etc. The so called “hero” who supposedly works alone? Good thing there were lots of people around to keep rescuing him. He is so filled with guilt and angst he spends a large portion of the book in a monologue!

Dumb

If that is the best agents the world has to offer, North Korea would rule the world

Story OK. Virtual voice better than expected.

The story was predictable thriller, which is what I wanted.

I'll give more feedback on Virtual Voice. It is better than "text to speech". However, it shares some problems in common with text-to-speech:

* Words such as read present tense and read past tense are pronounced the same with short e. I did not hear "bow." Hence I don't know the extent of the problem with words that require context to pronounce correctly.

* Punctuation is sometimes read, such "dash." This is also that happens with text-to-speech.

Virtual Voice does a much better job of phrasing than text-to-speech. Pacing and breaths sound like a breathy reader. It is not robotic like text-to-speech.

Emotions, change of voice for characters, and other elements of a professional human reader's performance all require knowledge of context and applying that knowledge. Given this limitation, I think Virtual Voice does an admirable job.

Great story!

I was actually looking for nonfiction about North Korea when I stumbled upon this. I listened to the sample and got sucked in. The story was entertaining, with twists and turns. The characters were well done, and I was captivated until the end. The virtual voice was actually decent, and I often forgot I was listening to a virtual voice, until something was read that sounded off, such as saying "dash" quite often when a hyphen was used, or an inflection wasn't quite right. Overall, five stars and worth a listen!