Mission Road

A Tres Navarre Mystery

By: Rick Riordan

Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte

Having scored the big three of mystery’s most-sought after awards—the Edgar, Anthony and Shamus—Rick Riordan writes with a blazing talent that matches the heat of his novels’ Texas settings. Wisecracking PI Tres Navarre receives an unexpected visit from old friend Ralph Arguello. But Ralph, a seemingly reformed criminal, isn’t there to shoot the breeze. His wife, Ana, a San Antonio police detective, has been gunned down—casting suspicion on Ralph because Ana had been looking into Ralph’s involvement in a Mafia-related murder.

©2005 Rick Riordan (P)2005 Recorded Books, LLC

a good book in the series

the author Weezer tail with his recurring characters some tragic strike some and a loss of some of the witty repartee that was so prevalent in his earlier versions of the series. a good performance and worth a listen

Tres Navarre >=Mythology

if your only experience with Rick Riordan is his works with Mythology, you've GOT to give the Tres Navarre series a try. The plot and character development of this work pulls together major characters from the series in a way that is at least as good as what Riordan accomplishes in his works for younger readers.

There were at least 3 times in the last 1/3 of the book that I thought Riordan had used a clever, but transparent, cycling through potential suspects for the defining crime of the novel, only to pull off an ending that came out of left field for me. Yet it had been consistently developed and set up all the way back to the beginning.

I do miss the Tres Navarre as Tai Chi BadAss, and especially the medieval literature background from the first few novels --Tres has just been a smart PI for most of the last 3 novels -- but Riordan gives Tres a grown-up maturity/change arc that is impressive. It's relatively easy to show character growth when your characters are teens and navigating the pitfalls of adolescence, but it takes skill to have adult characters grow, change, and mature.

A great listen, and I'm sure it would play well on the page as well, but the narrator handles and provides depth and nuance to both make and female characters.

I gave up

After couple hours of listening, I gave up and stopped listening. The plot is full of confusing flashback and the entire storyline is like a plot of B type movie.