Karen Teasdale Audiobooks

Poison Kisses: a first-person account where memoir meets true crime

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.6/5 average

271 listener ratings

Who is Karen Teasdale?

Three shelves claim Poison Kisses, and the combination is telling: memoir, crime, and personal development. Work that lands in all three at once is almost always the same kind of work, in which something happened to somebody and the telling of it became the way through.

Karen Teasdale reads her own writing, which reinforces the impression. Ten hours in your own voice is an act of ownership; a performer can carry a story, but only the person who lived it can pause in exactly the right places. The personal development tag suggests the account does not end at the worst of it, and that some part of the book is concerned with what comes after.

Our catalogue holds the work and leaves the rest to the listener, which feels appropriate for a title of this sort.

Karen Teasdale in audiobooks

Self-narration is the defining feature here. Over ten hours read by the author gives the material a directness that no studio performance quite replicates, and listeners tend to respond to that.

They plainly have: a strong four-and-a-half-star average across several hundred verdicts is a serious showing for a book without a marketing budget behind it. Approach it with some care, since the title is not being coy about its subject matter, and give it consecutive sittings rather than snatched fragments. Readers who follow first-person accounts from the memoir shelf, or who come to crime for the human cost rather than the puzzle, will find that it lands hard. Browse the audiobooks below.