Audiobook review: The Call by Gavin Strawhan

Gavin Strawhan’s The Call is a challenging listen for newbie audiobook listener Shaun Bamber.

As a busy father of three, I get most of my reading done in two particular places.

Unfortunately, neither locale proved suitable for tackling my first audiobook—crime thriller The Call, the debut novel of television scriptwriter Gavin Strawhan (Go Girls, Nothing Trivial, Filthy Rich).

Thanks to the steady, even tones of narrator and veteran Kiwi actor Gareth Reeves (Underbelly, The Cult), settling down for a serious bout of listening in bed at night just led to long periods of drifting off, only to be woken in confusion two chapters later by an especially expressive burst of character dialogue.

As for my second favourite reading spot – well, let’s just say there are hygiene concerns.

While I’m pretty sure that in traditional book form, The Call would be what you’d more or less call a page-turner – intrigue, action and drama aplenty – as an audiobook, it is a bit of a struggle initially for a newbie.

Centring on tough but damaged Auckland cop Detective Honey Chalmers – great TV name that – the story shuttles back and forth between Honey’s fictional hometown of Waitutu and the mean streets of Onehunga, Sandringham and Henderson Valley.

Juggling bad guys out to get her, an ageing mother swerving towards dementia, the reappearance of an old flame, a gang informant who gets too close and awful secrets from her dead sister’s past, our hero, Detective Chalmers, has a lot on her plate, to say the least.

But as an audiobook, the plot is a gradual accent, and it’s a good third of the way in before things start to click.

This isn’t helped by the way the story jumps around in time from chapter to chapter, leading us through two gradually converging timelines, which is, for some reason, a lot harder to follow when listening as opposed to reading.

As such, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this for first-time audiobook listeners.

That said, those willing to persevere will eventually find themselves drawn into Strawhan’s well-drawn world, peopled not just with cops and crims but also their fully fleshed-out whanau members and loved ones, adding both extra angst and more meaningful points of connection to the proceedings.

It’s in this respect that the author’s knack for vividly sketching out a character’s background and personality in just a few paragraphs comes to the fore, elevated by Reeves’ efforts as he deftly voices the ever-expanding and increasingly disparate cast.

Narration-wise, there are a few missteps here and there, however – Reeves veers perilously close to stereotyping when it comes to the Māori, Indian, Spanish and Eastern-European accents of some of the walk-on characters – but I guess that’s to be expected when you have just one guy voicing everyone.

Speaking of which, you also have to question why a male narrator was chosen for a novel in which the main protagonist and several major supporting characters are women.

That’s not to cast any shade on Reeves, though. He has a professional’s ear for the varying needs of the story – delivering intensity, tenderness, anger, and hopelessness as appropriate – and he’s a talented enough voice artist that at no point are we in danger of getting anyone mixed up either.

Still, I can’t help but wonder how The Call might have turned out with a female narrator.

The Call by Gavin Strawhan Narrated by Gareth Reeves Length: 8h 44m