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Whispersync for Voice Free Audiobook for Nov 2014 -- exp 30 Nov

• FREE - Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson

Stevenson's most often dramatized and distorted novella gets its umpteenth audiobook narration from the talented Scott Brick. Although his British accent is a wee bit shaky, he doesn't disappoint. He narrates in his wonted American voice with particular attention to atmosphere and delivers his British characters with personality and a reserve that lends appropriate gravity to the tale and plays effectively against its melodrama.

When a brute of a man tramples an innocent girl, apparently out of spite, two bystanders catch the fellow and force him to pay reparations to the girl's family. The brute's name is Edward Hyde.

A respected lawyer, Utterson, hears this story and begins to unravel the seemingly manic behavior of his best friend, Dr. Henry Jekyll, and his connection with Hyde. Several months earlier, Utterson had drawn up an inexplicable will for the doctor, naming Hyde as his heir in the event that he disappears. Fearing his friend has been blackmailed into this arrangement, Utterson probes deeper into both Jekyll and his unlikely protégé. He is increasingly unnerved at each new revelation.

In a forerunner of psychological dramas to come, Stevenson uses Hyde to show that we are both repulsed by and attracted to the darker side of life, particularly when we can experience it in anonymity.