Bernice Summerfield: Adorable Illusion
by Gary Russell
I'm catching up on my Bernice Summerfield audio dramas, and I paused to read this novel. I listened to it between discs four and five of the Missing Persons box set based on what I read on-line; it's always tricky to place things before you experience them! Having read it, I would now advise listening to it during the Road Trip box set, between discs two and three. (See my Bernice Summerfield timeline for full details.)
Bernice Summerfield may seem like an audio character now, but of course she was born in prose novels-- and, unfortunately, this is the last one. (All subsequent
Bernice Summerfield books have been anthologies.) Doubly unfortunately because 1) this is a medium where she can thrive, and 2) this last appearance of Benny in her original medium is wretched. Like a lot of Gary Russell novels, it feels like he had 100 pages of ideas, and so this is padded out with long, unfunny diversions, and ostensibly humorous exposition. Nothing about the characters here will grab you, and much of the plot makes little sense. (Benny is given the identity of a murderer, on a ship with the parents of the murder victims, and apparently none of these people
know what the murderer looks like!) Some subplots work to set up the climax of the
New Frontiers box set... an episode that was actually quite bad. The character of Avril Fenman appears here, but shortly before reading this I listened to the audiobook of Fenman's original appearances in
The Squire's Crystal and
The Glass Prison and this isn't her, it's just a different character with the same name.
Its sole saving grace is that we do get our first (and, I think, only) check in on the Collection cast, the characters who made up the series's ensemble for ten years, but haven't appeared since Escaping the Future, released four years prior. I liked getting to see what happened to Adrian, Bev, and Joseph, though what we see here does make it pretty improbable that Benny never ran into them again.
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