Audiobook Sample
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- Title: Triptych
- Author: Karin Slaughter
- Narrator: Michael Kramer
- Length: 13:19:00
- Version: Abridged
- Release Date: 15/08/2006
- Publisher: Random House (Audio)
- Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Horror, Suspense, Police Stories
- ISBN13: 9.78E+12
The first time I pressed play on Triptych, I was driving through the Georgia backroads near Macon, the Spanish moss hanging heavy like the moral ambiguity in Slaughter’s Atlanta. The landscape outside my rental car window – all red clay and peeling billboards – became the perfect backdrop for Michael Kramer’s gravelly narration. It reminded me of those Oaxacan evenings with Abuela Rosa, how the best storytellers make you feel the humidity of a place in your bones.
Karin Slaughter’s Triptych unfolds like a bloodstained roadmap of Atlanta’s dualities – wealth and poverty, justice and corruption, predator and prey. Through three fractured perspectives (the veteran detective, the vice cop, and the ex-con), Slaughter constructs a triptych altarpiece to human depravity and redemption. Michael Kramer’s narration captures this perfectly – his voice shifting seamlessly from Michael Ormewood’s barely-contained rage to Angie Polaski’s world-weary sensuality, each character as distinct as the neighborhoods they inhabit.
What struck me most was how Slaughter – through Kramer’s impeccable timing – makes you hear Atlanta. Not the sanitized CNN Center version, but the real city: the crackle of police radios in Cabbagetown, the sticky-floored bars of Little Five Points, the eerie quiet of abandoned textile mills. I found myself pulling over near Jackson Street Bridge just to listen, the same way I once paused my desert drive during One Hundred Years of Solitude when the prose demanded full attention.
Kramer’s greatest achievement is how he handles Slaughter’s structural genius. The novel’s three perspectives could feel disjointed in lesser hands, but he threads them together with subtle vocal connections – a shared cadence here, a mirrored breath pattern there. When the revelations come (and they come like gut punches), Kramer delivers them with the perfect balance of shock and inevitability. His portrayal of the ex-con John Shelley is particularly masterful – you can hear the character’s intelligence straining against his circumstances, like a caged animal testing the bars.
The audio production enhances Slaughter’s signature strengths: her forensic attention to procedural detail becomes immersive when voiced with Kramer’s investigative rhythm, and her psychological insights gain intimacy through his confidential tone. There’s a scene where Angie examines a crime scene that gave me chills – Kramer’s delivery made me feel the latex gloves snapping against her wrists.
If I have one critique, it’s that Kramer’s range, while impressive, occasionally flattens some of Slaughter’s female characters into similar-sounding tough girls. And the audio’s unrelenting intensity might benefit from the occasional musical interlude or atmospheric pause – moments to breathe like those Abuela Rosa would insert between her darkest tales.
For fans of Southern noir, Triptych stands alongside Greg Iles’ Natchez Burning trilogy in its unflinching examination of institutional rot. But where Iles goes panoramic, Slaughter goes endoscopic – and Kramer’s narration is the perfect lens. It’s criminal this isn’t more widely available as a free audiobook, though the experience justifies the premium price.
As I finished the final chapter parked outside an Atlanta waffle house at 2 AM, Kramer’s voice lingering like smoke, I realized this wasn’t just a crime story – it was a travelogue through the shadowed alleys of human nature. Slaughter and Kramer make perfect tour guides: unsparing, insightful, and impossible to ignore.
With a flashlight under the covers and ears tuned for trouble,
Marcus Rivera
