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Title: Coffin's Game

Author: Gwendoline Butler

Narrator: Nigel Carrington

Format: Unabridged

Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins

Language: English

Release date: 11-25-13

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 1 votes

Genres: Mysteries & Thrillers, Modern Detective

Publisher's Summary:

London's Second City is shaken by a terrorist's bomb and a woman's body is found in a damaged building. The face is unrecognizable, the fingertips have been removed, but the handbag by the corpse appears to belong to Stella Pinero, the wife of John Coffin, Chief Commander of the Second City Police.

Editorial Reviews:

In Coffin's Game, the late British mystery writer Gwendoline Butler managed to create a gripping tale of murder and terrorism without sacrificing the novel's central emotional relationship between a man and his wife. John Coffin, Butler's Second City police commander who starred in 34 of her mystery novels, is assigned to an urban bombing when he discovers that one of the victims might be his wife, Stella Pinero. The plot takes off from there, with a city's worth of twists and turns along the way.

London-based actor Nigel Carrington is responsible for performing the entire Coffin canon, thus he knows Butler's hero well. Carrington's enviable voice is cultivated and refined, but with a touch of sauciness befitting a complicated character.

Members Reviews:

A Good Writer but Not the Best of Her Work

This latest installment in Gwendoline Butler's Coffin series was a disappointment. The plot was a convoluted mess of kidnapping, misplaced loyalties, a number of secrets, the usual deviants, detectives looking over their shoulders, a group of terrorists, and Chief Commander Coffin who knows all but tells nothing.

Stella Pinero goes on a short R&R to calm her inner demons, the ones that seem to wake her in the middle of a performance and ask, "What are you doing and why are you doing it?" She leaves shortly after two explosions (presumably placed by terrorists) occur in one day in the Second City. Stella disappears for several days, but her purse turns up at the scene of a murder, along with her clothing on the body of the deceased. There is also a disturbing photograph of Stella chewing on a human arm. Even the Chief Commander admits:

"It's like a Victorian melodrama ... The heroine's handkerchief turns up to incriminate her."

Of course, when Stella shows up, she acts as if nothing has happened. Oh, those actresses and their pesky secrets!

The investigation continues, along with much agonizing on everyone's part for having to suspect the Chief Commander's wife. Archie Young tries to get along with Inspector Lodge, a specialist in terrorism brought in to help out with the bombings. Phoebe Astley is as competent as ever, but her boss is worried about who she's sleeping with. But these have little to do with the overall plot and don't really do much to advance the story.

Coffin's "game" turns out to be little more than an investigation technique of walking the witness through familiar places. He turns it into a game of trust between him and his wife, trying to determine whether she will trust him with the truth, and it plays out rather like the melodrama Coffin alludes to earlier as he uncovers once of Stella's secrets from the past.

Butler's focus on her main character is overwhelmingly ponderous throughout the book. Coffin never seems to grow out of his staid isolationism. The seconary characters -- even the criminals -- are more interesting.