Annette Bening to Lead Liane Moriarty Series Adaptation ‘Apples Never Fall’ at Peacock

For fans of dark academia, murder mystery, multiple suspects, multiple POV, and full cast audiobooks.

The Urban Promise Prep School is an all boys charter school in Washington, D.C. that may pride itself in education but is really just a cruel place that thinks students need to be broken, constantly threatened with punishment, and not even allowed to talk while walking the hallways. Now their strict principal, Kenneth Moore, has been shot and killed. Three students are the suspects: Trey, the basketball player living with his uncle, trying to get looked at by scouts, who threatened the principal before his death; Ramón, who has no plans on going the route of his cousin in joining a gang, makes pupusas every day to sell for needed money even though it’s against the rules, and whose hair brush was found at the scene; and J.B., who’s sick of all the rules, just got his dream girl to be his girlfriend, and who somehow has the principal’s blood on him.

We get the story by following the boys now and right before the shooting, along with a whole cast of characters from J.B.’s girlfriend and Ramón’s Abuela to people living in the community. We see opinions and rumors vs the life each boy is living from their point of view until what really happened is revealed…

The audiobook has a great full cast and is really well produced including adding, without distraction, atmospheric sounds. It felt like a lot of care and attention went into the production. The narrators are Alfred Vines, Anthony Lopez, Brad Sanders, Christopher Hampton, Eliana Marianes, Hannah Church, Henriette Zoutomou, Jaime Lincoln Smith, Maria Liatis, Renier Cortes, Suehyla El-Attar, and Xenia Willacey.

(TW child abuse/ mentions alcoholism)

For fans of fun crime books, witty dialogue, and a good amount of ridiculous situations.

This is the third book in the series and you can jump in here, you won’t be lost in that who/what you need to know is given to you, but lots of the stories are snowballs starting from the first book, Finlay Donovan Is Killing It.

Finlay Donovan is an author who always either has writers block or is trying to actually make a deadline. While she herself may not be a disaster, the circumstances and situations she ends up in make her one a lot. She has two little kids, an ex-husband, and Vero, the babysitter who at this point is probably her only friend and her business partner. Once again her and Vero find themselves in various dangerous situations that also crank up the humor, ones that involve the mob and the two women playing undercover at police academy training. What could wrong?! Literally everything, creating comedy gold for readers.

The audiobook is narrated by Angela Dawe, one of the few narrators I’ve encountered who doesn’t do annoying child voices, and who really nails the timing of the humor in this novel. How she manages to not make herself laugh, I will never know.