{"id":7360,"date":"2018-07-16T07:26:07","date_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7360"},"modified":"2018-07-16T07:26:07","modified_gmt":"2018-07-16T11:26:07","slug":"animal-instinct-human-zoo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7360","title":{"rendered":"***Animal Instinct: Human Zoo"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Elephant

photo: Sam Felder, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By Simon Booker (this is an Audible Original, narrated by Imogen Church with a strong cast portraying the characters). PTSD has left former police detective Joe Cassidy (played by Brendan Coyle\u2014Bates on Downton Abbey<\/em>) with debilitating panic attacks. To get away from the world, he\u2019s set himself up in a remote cottage on Dungeness Beach in Kent, but the world comes to him when he\u2019s contacted by an old friend. Adam Pennyfeather (Joseph Marcell) inherited a wild animal park, and once saved Cassidy\u2019s life when he was almost trampled by an elephant. Adam\u2019s daughter Bella has gone missing, and he wants Cassidy to help find her. As a friend. As someone who owes him.<\/p>\n

Cassidy is also on hiatus from his marriage to Katie (Lia Williams), herself a police detective, who\u2019s handling the investigation of Bella\u2019s disappearance. When Bella\u2019s body is found in the elephant house, strung up like a side of meat, Katie is handed her first murder investigation. This creates inevitable tension between the couple, acting in their official and unofficial capacities.<\/p>\n

The fault lines in the Pennyfeather family gradually reveal themselves. Adam\u2019s wife is Isabel (Victoria Hamilton), and his younger daughter is Saffron (Rebekah Hinds). She and her husband, pizza entrepreneur Liam O\u2019Mara (Harry Lloyd), tell Cassidy about Isabel\u2019s lifelong loathing of her younger brother Felix, now Adam\u2019s lawyer, and how Isabel preferred her daughters to her son Gabriel. His birth led to serious post-partum psychosis for which she was hospitalized. Fearing for the boy\u2019s safety, Adam put him up for adoption many years before, and has since learned that Gabriel died in a motorcycle accident.<\/p>\n

Trying to worm her way into Cassidy\u2019s orbit is a relentless local journalist, an Australian woman named Chrissy McBride. Brigid Lohrey makes this character so annoying that, along with Cassidy, you\u2019ll probably think, \u201cOh, no, not her again!\u201d<\/p>\n

Cassidy believes his wife is seeing someone, was seeing someone while they were married, at least early on, and that their son Luke is the other man\u2019s child. Three DNA samples sent to a Cambridge lab will tell the tale, but is that information he really wants? Booker builds a nice bit of tension around the receipt of these laboratory results, and with Coyle\u2019s solid portrayal, you can appreciate how torn Cassidy is.<\/p>\n

The production includes sound effects of the type a foley artist would deploy in a radio play to indicate a closing door, footsteps, and the like. Possibly this is a matter of personal taste, but the sound effects feel redundant and jar me out of the story.<\/p>\n

Animal Instinct<\/em> is a nicely played, complex story and billed as the first book in a series featuring Joe Cassidy. TV writer Booker will find his listeners looking forward to more.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Simon Booker (this is an Audible Original, narrated by Imogen Church with a strong cast portraying the characters). PTSD has left former police detective Joe Cassidy (played by Brendan Coyle\u2014Bates on Downton Abbey) with debilitating panic attacks. To get … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"***Animal Instinct: Human Zoo - author Simon Booker is a TV writer with a flair for creating interesting characters!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[77,52,54,366,632,126],"tags":[1363,519,678,412,1362],"class_list":["post-7360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio-books","category-crime","category-detective","category-drama","category-police","category-reading-2","tag-animal-instinct","tag-england","tag-murder","tag-mystery","tag-simon-booker"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1UI","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7360"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7361,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7360\/revisions\/7361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}