The Body Reader

Detective Jude Fontaine Mysteries, Book 1

By: Anne Frasier

Narrated by: Emily Sutton-Smith

A Thriller Award winner, Best Paperback Original Novel.

For three years, Detective Jude Fontaine was kept from the outside world. Held in an underground cell, her only contact was with her sadistic captor, and reading his face was her entire existence. Learning his every line, every movement, and every flicker of thought is what kept her alive.

After her experience with isolation and torture, she is left with a fierce desire for justice—and a heightened ability to interpret the body language of both the living and the dead. Despite colleagues’ doubts about her mental state, she resumes her role at Homicide. Her new partner, Detective Uriah Ashby, doesn’t trust her sanity, and he has a story of his own he’d rather keep hidden. But a killer is on the loose, murdering young women, so the detectives have no choice: they must work together to catch the madman before he strikes again. And no one knows madmen like Jude Fontaine.

©2016 Theresa Weir (P)2016 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

Go Jude!

STORY (mystery suspense) - Jude Fontaine is a broken woman, having spent the past three years of her life as a hostage in a tiny basement. The story begins as she is in her final days of captivity and as she makes her break to freedom. But Jude is never free. She carries her years of torture at the hands of her captor with her as she tries to return to her previous life as a Minneapolis detective. She had become tough as nails in order to endure her captivity, and she gained a heightened sense of awareness of her surroundings and those around her. Smells, body language, facial nuances...all now in her bag of tricks as she and her new partner, Uriah, begin investigating the murders of several young girls. The cover art and name of the book seem to impart almost a paranormal quality to The Body Reader, but that is not the case. The book is actually just your normal police procedural with a sprinkling of Jude's newfound ability to notice details.

I enjoyed the book a lot. Jude is an interesting main character, and you will root for her as she tries to fight her personal demons and do her investigations. You will hear about her ordeal in the basement -- and it's horrible -- but thankfully it is treated quickly in the beginning of the book and then is just brief flashbacks later on. I found the book to be fast-paced and interesting, with a satisfactory ending.

PERFORMANCE - Good job, nothing particularly remarkable however.

OVERALL - This book has no actual sex acts, but there is mention of past rape and the F-word occurs a couple times. There are multiple murders, one including mutilation, and the above-mentioned description of Jude's torture. I would recommend The Body Reader equally for men and women. I tend to be overly sensitive and don't like a lot of violence in my stories, but this book remained within my personal comfort zone.

Well, that was weird!

The Body Reader is a very, very dark story. Audible classifies it as a police procedural, and in a way it is. It also has strong elements of a psychological thriller. It is...interesting if not especially enjoyable. The novel certainly kept me interested until the end. Emily Sutton-Smith does a nice job of narrating a difficult story.

She stinks as a "Body Reader"

I liked this book. But I could have loved it. The reasons I didn't would involve spoilers and I hate those. One thing that bothered me was the last few chapters. They were rushed to the point that loose ends were ignored, or worse, they concluded in a way that was, well, stupid. Another thing, she's NOT a good "Body Reader." She "reads" a lot of people incorrectly or can't "read" them at all. For the most part, the things she does pick up on are things that you and I would notice, too. But it's the things she misses about people, that are glaringly obvious to those of us who are just normally observant, that leaves me NOT wanting more from this author.

Excellent psychological mystery

I’ve never read a story like this one, and I read A LOT! Wonderful characters and the author doesn’t take the easy way out of the characters’s dilemmas. The narrator does a great job, seamless and natural transitions.

Did Siri narrate this?

The story is okay...predictable and a bit slow moving. Not very realistic, but that's okay, maybe it just wasn't for me. The narrator kills it though. It honestly sounds like it was read by a robot.