Interesting story and concept sadly ruined

Third book into the series and the narrator still can't pronounce Edinburgh even though the main characters are Scottish.
An improvement on the second book, at least they have taken the thesaurus off the 12 year old writing it.
Narrative flow and character development are still poor, only got such a high rating due to the strength of the idea behind the story

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Good book

This book is a welcome addition to the series. I've kind of gotten interested in the lives of Nina, Sam and Predou. There was a new narrator I think, some of his accents were rather dodgy, and Edinburg? Seriously?

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A series review, rather than individual ones.

The Order of the Black Sun series, basically, harkens back to the old pulp novels of investigators/scientists vs horrifying cults/evil baddies/Nazis, with a bit of a modern twist. They are generally fund reads, a little light on scientific accuracy in places, featuring a trio of protagonists who hail from Edinburgh: a modern historian, a Pulitzer winning reporter and a millionaire/billionaire (the books can't quite keep it straight which is the case) tech inventor.

Now the bad part: American narrators, yes, plural, across the series.

Any Brit listening to these is going to be constantly on edge waiting for the horrendous mispronunciations and accents. Some examples:

The narrator of the first two stories kept on referring to MI6 as M16.

The accents of the three protagonists jump about, at first I thought the reporter was meant to be Irish but when their abode was confirmed I realised he was meant to be Scots, but its strength comes and goes across the series; the other two protagonists have zero Scots accents, the historian can kind of be explained as she spent time in other universities, but the inventor often ends up sounding like a brash American businessman.

Place names, oh god, after 13 books I think I've only heard Edinburgh correctly pronounced once, but I suspect it was an accident on the part of the narrator; mostly it's a mix of Edinborough, Edinbruh (yes, the "r" before the "u"), and Edinburg (hard "g"). Then there's the one book that's predominantly set in Lyon, except, for the first two thirds of the book, where the narrator calls it Lion, even when being pronounced by a French taxi driver; I can only presume someone with a bit of knowledge walked in and asked why they kept talking about lions...

Despite all this, however, they are fun and should be enjoyed in a light-hearted manner.

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Good Story - but the worse scottish accent ever

What did you like most about Black Sun Rising?

The story is well researched and compelling -- but not as good as any work by Preston Douglas or Lee Child

Would you be willing to try another one of Kevin Clay’s performances?

Never knowingly -- this performance destroyed my listening experience -- his accent and pronunciation for Sam Cleave (a scottish character) and pronunciation of Edinburgh, Pillock amongst many others are appalling -- it completely destroyed my listening experience.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

No

Any additional comments?

ARGH !!!!!!!!!!!!

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2 people found this helpful

Wow

I love this.Set of audio book
I have to give it 5 out of 5

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