Curious Toys

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the premise at first: a fourteen-year-old girl tracking a serial killer in 1915? But *Curious Toys* won me over by refusing to sand down its edges. Pin isn’t a plucky Nancy Drew; she’s a feral, half-starved kid who’s spent her life dodging groping men and police raids, and her narration—delivered by Carol Monda with a raspy, seen-it-all cadence—makes every observation feel like a gut-punch. Monda’s performance is particularly brilliant in the way she handles Pin’s age: one moment she sounds like a world-weary adult, the next her voice wavers with the vulnerability of a child who’s never been allowed to be one. The production is clean, but the ambient sounds of the carnival (subtle calliope music, distant crowd noise) are used sparingly enough to avoid gimmickry. That said, the pacing stumbles in the middle. Hand’s detours into the perspectives of secondary characters (a queer artist, a disabled performer) are richly drawn but slow the momentum. And while the killer’s identity isn’t hard to guess, the chase is so atmospheric—all sweat-stained shirts and flickering gaslight—that it hardly matters. My bigger critique is the ending, which wraps up a little too neatly for a story that otherwise thrives on ambiguity. Still, the audiobook’s strength lies in its mood: a sticky, oppressive summer where danger lurks in every shadow, and the only people who can see it clearly are the ones society ignores. If you like your mysteries with more grit than glamour, this is your next listen—just don’t expect to sleep easy afterward.