The Circular Staircase

Most Narrators are difficult to understand! Disruptive to the flow of the story

Readers with accents are a distraction to understanding

Story kept my attention but the narration at times was challenging. I know I missed key elements of the mystery because I couldn’t understand what was being read.

Very good story EXCEPT very poor choice of narrators many were hard to understand

Story was fine. Some of the readers required careful listening because of accents.

Delicious and inspiring, made me cry in the end. Loved it!

Absorbing story with lots of twists and turns and intrigue. It was spoilt by the narration.

To many narrator changes with some that you couldn’t understand made it difficult to enjoy.

Some of the narrators are difficult to understand which makes it disjointed. However, the story is really good it's a thriller it twists and turns and just when you think you know what's going on the writer takes you up a different track. It is an excellent story well written and I would recommend it.

The book was good, but there was to many readers and some were hard to understand.

I did not care for some of the readers. The German sounding girl was very hard to understand and one of the male readers read too quickly. Other than that, I enjoyed the story. JLR

Loved the book, hated the narration. It drove me so mad I bought the book to read it myself.

Good story base and quite edgy but too many readers that you can’t quite understand

This story was very fascinating! A great deal of mystery. Who was trying to break in? Who was knocking holes in the wall? Miss Rachel was such a determined character. And Brave! Often foolishly so, but rarely caught out by it. And, of course, more clever than the detectives. But after initial distrust, worked closely with them to solve the crimes. The narration,however, was dreadful. Readers from all around the world! I don’t mind this when it is some book with short stories or sequences that can be considered separately. But for a mystery book where it is important to hear all the detail and recognise all the clues, it would be better to have only one. Or if that wasn’t possible, at the most 3 who all could speak clear enough to be understood. I don’t know the policies of Librivox about the choice of narrators for the books, but I would like to suggest that this book be recorded again with the thoughts from above in mind. I am grateful that the books by Mary Roberts Rinehart have been made available. This author is a great mystery writer, therefore I think her work should be honoured by being made more accessible for her followers to “read”.

I found "Various readers" difficult. The story was fine.

Always a pleasant surprise when the story you least expect turns out to be such a good one. This is one of those. I unlike others it seems, enjoy the different narrators. Has the feel of sitting at a gathering in the late 1800s passing a book around for each person to read a chapter. I do agree the one women’s accent was very thick, making it difficult to understand. Over all I enjoyed it.

Good book. Some narrators were difficult to understand.

I was enjoying this story until the narrator was switched. I eventually stopped listening

the narrator changed a lot and it was jarring, the story was kinda hard to keep up with because of the changing accents

The story had the potential to be really good but some of the Narrators were very hard to understand I didn’t finish it

The story was really good. It was really hard to follow and engage with the characters with the changing of narrators. Some of the accents were difficult - it wouldn’t have been so bad if that same person narrated the entire story so the listener get used to how the sound and character interpretation. I don’t think I’ll listen to anymore stories w different narrators.

It was very difficult to understand. They should not use narrators who don’t have a good grasp of the English language to narrate. There were simple words that were mispronounced by certain narrator which made the story not flew well. Also the story had certain comments s about Negroes and Indians that made it difficult to listen. I know that those were the times but it shows the racism of the time.

You guys have some great readers by why the mix up of voices through the whole book? First one reader then two chapters later it's another one. Male to female then back to male it can be annoying especially when the story was as good as this one. So GREAT story BUT too many narrators!!

Story is good but the narrative with all of the different voices and dialects was difficult to follow. Pronunciation of even the characters names was different and made the story confusing

Well done love the theme suspense. LOVE IT!!

The constant changing of narrator is distracting and the lady who did chapter 29,30, and 31 sounded drunk and kept changing grammar which I’m sure the author never left the word “the” out of all the sentences

Awful. Story too long. All the different ( unprofessional narrators made everything choppy

Had to pay close attention to the narrators I like audio books so I can multitask. I could not do that with this. I did enjoy the mystery itself. The book was great.

Although I appreciate that the readers are volunteers and thank them for their time, some of the accents were very hard to understand.

Good book for listening

Difficult to stay with the story when you have so many different readers and with different accents.

Could not understand some readers Kept having to re-play portions of the story several times to understand what was happening Partial my hearing, mainly the readers

I felt the narrators accents made the book hard to follow as it was distracting.

I did find the accents of different readers almost impossible to follow. If it had been just one person I could have got used to it, however it kept changing and I nearly gave up. It would have been better if it had been a woman reading the whole time. Having a man read occasionally seemed odd.

I loved the book with its many twists and turns. The characters were so unique and interesting. However, the narration by some readers was below par, owing to their accents. The thick Scottish accent especially was very hard to understand. This tended to detract from the charm and suspense of this utterly delightful story.

I enjoyed the book but with so many different readers it was hard to stay in the story and I’m sorry but when the story is from a woman’s point of view having a man read is wrong it just doesn’t come across the same.

Love this story but the constant change of readers is very distracting. They finally let one person read several chapters and I was really enjoying it and then suddenly changed readers again. This reader read too fast and without expression. I gave up on the story. Very disappointing.

The story itself was interesting. What I disliked was that there were several different readers. I listened to mispronunciations often. One reader had such a strong accent that he was difficult to understand.

Some of the readers were difficult to understand due to the mispronunciations.

Lovely story told in a brilliant way. Some very good narration but some I really battled to understand

I like older mysteries & this was good. I only read one book before by the author & I liked so I decided to listen to this one.

too many narrators with varying volumes made a great mystery hard to follow.

The book was very good but some of the narrators were speaking too fast and were difficult to understand.

Enjoyed the book overall but some of the readers had too strong of an accent which made listening extremely difficult and one reader just read too fast . I listen on driving trips and don’t need to have to concentrate that hard to hear the story. Becomes a distraction .

Great story. I really enjoyed it. It had several narrators offering nearly every accent I can think of. Some were more difficult to understand, one (Russian?) being especially difficult. If she had been the only narrator, I certainly would not have finished the book.