Book (Audiobook) Review: Mrs. Plansky's Revenge by Spencer Quinn

Rating: 3.5⭐️

Seventy-one-year-old Loretta Plansky is living a content retired life in her condo in Florida. Financially secure as a result of a flourishing business venture with her deceased husband, she is active and alert and constantly fielding requests for money from her adult children Nina and Jack for their ambitious (and not too well-planned) business ventures. She also has to deal with the tantrums of her ninety-eight-year-old father who is a resident of an assisted living facility nearby. Late one night she receives a call from someone posing as her grandson Will, asking her for assistance after being arrested for a DUI which ultimately results in her being scammed and her (substantial) life savings being stolen. The FBI is alerted and from what information Mrs. Plansky manages to glean from them, those responsible for the crime might be working out of a small town in Romania. Mrs. Plansky is not one to sit quietly and she ends up traveling to Romania in search of the person/people who stole her money. The narrative follows Mrs. Plansky as she leaves no stone unturned in tracking the criminals who robbed her of her life savings.

I listened to the audiobook narrated by Petrea Burchard. The narrative is presented from the perspectives of Mrs. Plansky and Dinu, a Romanian teenager who gets himself into a lot of trouble working for his uncle’s illegal ventures. The narrator does a good job of voicing the characters but the narration does not make up for the repetitiveness or the fact that the protagonist is constantly referred to as "Mrs. Plansky” throughout the story, which is a bit annoying. While I enjoyed the humor and the characters and appreciate the central theme of the story (unfortunately, scams such as the one mentioned in this story are not too uncommon), I thought that the pacing of the first half of the story was rather slow. The Romania segment should have been longer and the ending less rushed. There isn’t much mystery since the readers are made aware of the identity of the culprits quite early on and Mrs. Plansky’s investigation finds fruition as a result of a tad too many convenient coincidences.

Overall, Mrs. Plansky's Revenge by Spencer Quinn is a fun, light-hearted read, with an interesting cats of characters but not quite as engrossing as I had hoped.

Many thanks to MacMillan Audio and NetGalley for the ALC. All opinions expressed in this review are my own. The book/audiobook is due to be released on July 25, 2023.