Schooled

A Lexy Cooper Videogame Mystery, Book 1

By: Christa Charter

Narrated by: Tassoula Kokkoris

Length: 6 hrs

Publisher's summary

When a young woman's nude body is discovered on the Xenon game company's corporate campus, community manager Lexy Cooper gets an early morning call from her uncle, homicide detective Mike Malick, to ID the corpse. As Malick investigates the crime, Lexy works the case from inside Xenon and discovers more about the seedy underbelly of the games industry than she ever wanted to know.

©2013 Christa Charter (P)2014 Christa Charter

A decent mystery soured.

The Good:
The mystery part of this book is fairly good. The villains may not be genius masterminds, but their story does seem plausible and I found it to be interesting.

The Bad:
The 'heroine', Lexy, is a bit pathetic. She is so desperate for attention that she will demean herself and screw anyone just to get attention. I feel that she is childish and needs to grow a shred of self-confidence so that she can get a little respect. It is because of this that I did not rate the story higher. Additionally, Tassoula Kokkoris (the narrator) has a limited vocal range and struggles to differentiate between the large cast of characters.

The Terrible:
While Ms. Kokkoris did a mediocre job with the actual narration, I must emphasize that the recording of this book sucked. There are many portions of the book that have a faint background noise. There are portions where the sound shifts despite still being the same character speaking (possibly due to changing microphones or something). Finally, nobody bothered to normalize the volume of the audio between the tracks - meaning that I was constantly turning the volume up or down just to maintain a comfortable listening level.

Conclusion:
The book itself was decent and certainly not a waste of time. However, I have difficulty justifying paying full price for a recording of this quality. I strongly feel that the studio doing the recording needs to get their act together if they wish to produce anything in the future.

Good engaging story

What did you love best about Schooled?

I read it first and enjoyed the book. The characters are interesting and it is a view of a world that I am truly only on the outskirts of.

What did you like best about this story?

The pace of the story is very good. It is a quick read or listen and but fun.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Tassoula Kokkoris?

I don't know if it is the production but there was a lot so white noise in the recording. Tassoula sound like she is reading more than perfroming. The voices were good and consistent. I did find her narration somewhat boring.