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    13 1/2: A Novel
    13 1/2: A Novel
    13 1/2: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    13 1/2: A Novel

    Written by Nevada Barr

    Narrated by Dan John Miller

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    With 13 ½, Nevada Barr, New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning Anna Pigeon novels, has written a taut and terrifying psychological thriller. It carries the reader from the horrifying 1970s murder spree of a child—dubbed “Butcher Boy” by a shocked public—in Rochester, Minnesota, to Polly, the abused daughter of Mississippi “trailer trash,” to post-Katrina New Orleans.

    In Jackson Square in the French Quarter a tarot card reader told Polly Deschamps she would be a success. Thirty years later, Polly is a respected professor of literature with good friends and her own home—a safe life for her and her two daughters.

    Butcher Boy, released on his seventeenth birthday, shook the snow from his boots and headed south.

    New Orleans, a Mecca for runaways then and now, offers sanctuary but never forgiveness.

    When Polly falls in love with Marshall Marchand, a restoration architect who is helping to rebuild her adopted city, shadows of the past rise out of the poisoned ground of New Orleans as thick and deadly as the toxic waters of the flood.

    Like history, some crimes are doomed to repeat themselves. Evil stays the same, only the victims’ names change. As two broken pasts collide in an uncertain present, Polly is determined that her children’s names will never be on that list.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateSep 29, 2009
    ISBN9781441800558
    13 1/2: A Novel
    Author

    Nevada Barr

    NEVADA BARR is a novelist, actor, and artist best known for her New York Times bestselling, award-winning mystery series featuring Anna Pigeon. A former National Park Service Ranger, she currently lives with her husband in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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    Reviews for 13 1/2

    3.5/5

    211 ratings34 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I listened to two-thirds of the audio version of this book and plan on finishing it in the print format. The plot is definitely spine-tingling, but the language is very offensive. I did not enjoy driving and having narrator screaming the "F" word repeatedly along with every other profanity imaginable. I realize that Barr probably did it to make her characters realistic, but I feel that it was way overdone. I'm not convinced people talked like that in the time period in question, although perhaps they did in prison. Nonetheless, I don't care to listen to it and ranked the book lower for that reason. The perverse evil of one character fills this very dark book. If that is what you like to read about, then you will no doubt love it. I have chosen to fill my mind with slightly more positive topics while not ignoring the evil that is certainly present in the world. I'll wait for the next Anna Pigeon book with anticipation.
    • 5/5
      Very good, interesting characters and a good strong story. Worth a read!
    • 4/5
      Audiobook read by Dan John Miller3.5*** From the book jacket - Nevada Barr has written a taut and terrifying psychological thriller. It carries the reader from the horrifying 1970s murder spree of a child – dubbed “Butcher Boy” – in Rochester, Minnesota, to Polly, the abused daughter of Mississippi “trailer trash,” to post-Katrina New Orleans.My reactionsI’ve been a fan of Barr’s Anna Pigeon mystery series for a while now, but this is a completely different standalone novel. Much darker and more terrifying than the series most readers know her by. The dual time frames are at first confusing, but even when the reader realizes the connection between the two different stories, the tension of how it will play out remains. I was captivated from the beginning, and Barr held my attention throughout. I did figure out the twist some time before the characters did, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment. I will warn readers that there is considerable foul language, and some very graphic scenes of violence and mayhem. Dan John Miller does a fine job of narrating the audiobook, though his voice for the women does seem a bit “forced” - a couple of times I was reminded of my father telling me the story of Red Riding Hood and how he voiced the wolf playing the grandma. The way Barr plots and tells the story is the main reason to read this book.
    • 2/5
      For what is advertised as a thriller, this book was awfully boring with huge plot holes, a shallow story and extremely one-dimensional characters. In addition, the end gets confusing because two of the main characters have changed their names. I had trouble keeping them straight but didn’t care enough about the characters to try and figure it out. I finished listening to it simply because I was too lazy to find another book.
    • 3/5
      As an 11-year-old in Minnesota, Dylan is sent to a juvenile detention center after murdering his parents and younger sister. The only one of his family spared was his brother Rich, who continues to visit him in prison. When Dylan is released as a young adult, he and Rich stick together and relocate to New Orleans, in the hope of beginning a new life. Meanwhile, Polly, who's grown up in Louisiana in poverty with a drunk for a mother, has turned her life around. She meets and eventually marries an architect named Marshall Marchand. But secrets emerge, and soon the brothers cross paths with Polly.This is the first novel I've ever read of Nevada Barr. She's apparently better known for her Anna Pigeon series, which has a lot of followers. This is a stand-alone novel. I read the abridged audio version. Sometimes abridgments are decent, though with this one, I felt like a lot of the story was cut out. Transitions were rough and choppy. Based on other reviews, I missed out on all the excessive blood and gore of this story, but that's okay. I can give or take that. But overall, this novel will ultimately be pretty forgettable for me. It was generally very predictable and nothing real original here. I may have enjoyed an unabridged version better, but I'm ready to move on regardless.
    • 2/5
      Hmmm.... good, but I had figured out the twist... just not how it would be exposed. So lots of reading was fruitless, pointless.
      And they got married without telling LOTS of stuff that should NOT have been kept secret!
    • 4/5
      Great plot twists that you keep you guessing all the way to the end. This is not part of her National Park Mysteries with Anna Pigeon. Great stand alone mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
    • 4/5
      Story of the Butcher Boy, an accused murderer of his family in 1971 and his life in New Orleans after he's released.
    • 1/5
      What a huge disappointment for my family! We've enjoyed every one of Barr's Anna Pigeon series over the years and looked forward to hearing this one. A few lines of dialog in the first chapter leapt out at me and ruined whatever suspense/mystery might have carried the story. I wondered later if perhaps the reader, knowing the whole story at the time he read aloud, might have tried too hard to make a couple of comments seem unimportant. Something in his delivery made me ask a question and then mentally answer it. Not until the last chapter did the author give the answer -- the same answer -- but by then I was too bored to care.The characters were not very compelling. Good people, striving to succeed and live a full life in spite of horrendous childhood experiences...shouldn't it be fairly easy to make them appealing? And the villain was one-dimensionally evil, with no real background on why he was that way. Even a favorite author falters once in awhile, but I will not seek out any future non-series books Ms. Barr chooses to publish.
    • 3/5
      Pretty good mystery- if you like things reminiscent of the film Jagged Edge, then you'll like this. I listened to it on audio and the narration is excellent.
    • 2/5
      This is the best Lifetime Original Movie I've seen yet. Even so, I was totally pulling for the sociopathic axe-murderer to shut that woman up.
    • 4/5
      Nevada Barr's books are getting darker I think. This one was certainly shiver-inducing. Of course, that didn't stop me reading it. I've read many of her books but this is the first one that doesn't take place in a federal park. Instead it takes place mostly in New Orleans, a city I visited a year and a half ago, so I was able to picture some of the places she wrote about in the book. There is also a segment in Rochester MN and although I haven't actually been there I've been to Minneapolis a few times so I'm somewhat familiar with that landscape too. It's always neat to be able to picture the setting of a book.The book starts out with a horrific murder in Rochester. A young boy has killed his sister, parents and the family cat with an axe. His older brother just barely survives a wound to his leg. The boy is soon dubbed The Butcher Boy but his real name is Dylan Raines. He is only 11 so he is put into a juvenile detention centre until he is 18 years old and then he will spend another 9 years in an adult jail. His brother, Richard, sticks by him and visits him every visiting day travelling hundreds of miles to do so. Dylan cannot remember anything about the murders. A psychotherapist, anxious to write a book that will make it onto the New York Times bestseller list, tries everything to make him recall the acts. Nothing works, not even the LSD he gives him, although it does send Dylan into a homicidal rage trying to kill the man with an imaginary axe. When Richard finds out he has the doctor fired. That's understandable but he also has the math teacher, the only one who believes Dylan to be innocent, fired as well. Richard manages to have Dylan freed when he reaches 18.Meanwhile, in New Orleans, a young girl who has run away from her alcoholic mother and abusive step-fathers shows up at Jackson Square and has her fortune read by one of the Tarot card readers. Polly is bright and manages to get educated and become a literature professor at Tulane University. She also marries, has two girls and then gets divorced. Every month she goes to Jackson Square and has her cards read. It is there that Marshall Marchand sees her and is instantly smitten. Marshall is an architect who is extremely busy in post-Katrina New Orleans and usually he works all hours. When he sees Polly he drops everything and invites her to tea. He tells Polly he has never been married although he was engaged once. He and his brother share a duplex. Instantly the reader begins to suspect that Marshall and his brother Danny are the Raines brothers. What follows this meeting is like a horror film -- you know the heroine is going to do something to put herself in danger and you shout at her "Don't do it!" Of course, she does it.The really intriguing part of the book is that you never know until the last few chapters which Marchand brother is which Raines brother and you never know if one or both are psychotic killers. I had to read the last 100 pages without a stop in order to find out the truth.
    • 3/5
      I miss her National Park mysteries, but this was pleasingly complex.
    • 3/5
      As they say, it's the journey not the destination that is the point. First section gives the childhood abuse background of the female main character. There's not much spirit there, it comes off flat and I didn't care about the girl at all. Once she grew up, she was even less interesting to me. She remained a flat character. The next section introduces the male main character and the crime that took place in his childhood home. By the 5th paragraph, you knew (intuitively if not directly) who did the crime. The way it's presented is very familiar to anyone who loves these sorts of books, movies, and true crime tv. We're not fooled even though, of course, everyone around the criminal is. However, nothing really exciting or suspenseful happens until quite near the end. It was a chore to get that far. And, as I said before, we already know "who done it" and so the tension just comes from the ultimate, inevitable confrontation and wondering who will survive it. It's nothing new and the characters remained, for me, flat and unsympathetic despite the shocking crime and the way the lives of those around it were affected. I would have enjoyed it more if, at the very least, the author would have worked in some psychological theories or explanations for the crime but we are left with just a vague sense that the criminal wasn't quite right in the head (well of course!). I suppose that's the way reality is, we often never find out why people commit horrible crimes, but this is fiction and I found it lacking. On the other hand, the author could write a sequel about the criminal's background and motives which I think I would be a much better thriller. Despite my disappointment, I think I will check out some of her other novels.
    • 4/5
      A good solid mystery. Introspective without being too much. A twist on evil is in the eye of the beholder and the effect of evil effectively hiding among the innocent.
    • 3/5
      I've enjoyed most of Nevada Barr's books and was unsure about being out of the 'Anna Pigeon' realm. I found the story interesting in many respects - how a sane person could survive prison (juvenile detention), how one manages to live successfully after leaving such a horror of childhood, etc. - but this was never a mystery. The truth was quickly telegraphed.I would have liked the character of Polly to have had more depth and explanation but most effort went into Dylan, who did have the worst life of the two.I'll continue to read all of her books but I wanted more from this tale than I received.
    • 2/5
      I love all of Nevada Barr's books--except this one. Just didn't do it for me.
    • 3/5
      9 hours! maybe 4. the story was ok but told in a very convoluted way. the reader was good and kept me at it.
    • 5/5
      Oh, man! I really loved being scared to death reading this book! It think the link Ms Barr makes with well-known killers such as Scott Peterson, gave me an extra chill. It referenced for me that snake-dead-eye-evil psychopath that "13 1/2" describes so well.So as not to spoil the story, I will only tell you that this is the tale of two boys whose parents are murdered in a bloodbath by one of the boys. Following that a son is taken to jail, then to a mental hospital/prison, there are horrific things that happen...life evolves and we have a mystery to solve that is just seeping terror at the seams.Not Nevada's ordinary murder mystery, and I'm glad because I'm not really a fan of her ordinary fare. If she writes more like this one...I'm going to be an avid reader of her books!!I recommend this to all who like Jeffrey Deaver, Dennis Lehane, and such authors, without reservation.
    • 1/5
      The first review gives a very good synopsis of the story, so I will go straight to my own impressions of the book. I was so disappointed! I have recommended Nevada Barr's national park series to many people. As I listened to this book, I could hardly believe it had been written by the same author. I found the book full of holes and the resolution easy to guess. Throughout, I was aggravated on the time spent on Polly's youth and the huge gap between that and the Polly we next discover in New Orleans. We got glimpses of how the two boys transitioned from their youth to their new lives in New Orleans, but how Polly went from a runaway to a college professor is left quite unexplored. Consequently, I never found her particularly credible. To be fair, I listened to the book over quite a span of time and sometimes when I was quite tired. Within that context, however, I can't really think of anything to recommend about the book.
    • 4/5
      First Line: "By the Month or by the Night" read the sign over the entrance to the trailer park.In a radical departure from her Anna Pigeon mystery series, Nevada Barr gives us a psychological thriller that begins in the 1970s in a trailer park in Mississippi. It then moves to Minnesota with the murder spree of a child dubbed "Butcher Boy." Finally in post-Katrina New Orleans, the adults from both these broken childhoods collide.Polly escaped from her abusive "trailer trash" childhood at the age of fifteen, running away to New Orleans. Now she's a respected college professor with good friends, her own home, and two small children she adores."Butcher Boy" was released on his seventeenth birthday. His surviving brother has vowed to take care of him, and they both head south to that Mecca for runaways: New Orleans.When Polly meets and falls in love with Marshall Marchand, a restoration architect who's helping to rebuild the city, their pasts are set on a collision course.I love Barr's books, and although this book is very good, it didn't quite meet my expectations. It has everything to do with the characters. Perhaps it's because my mind is too devious, but there were few surprises with the Marchand brothers. I knew how that part of the plot was going to work itself out. That was a bit disappointing, but the character of Polly did much in making up for the deficiencies of the Marchands.Even after the train wreck of her childhood, Polly was such a strong, centered, caring person that I wish the book could have focused even more on her. I wanted more Polly. Perhaps you'll understand after reading these two quotes: "Two girls-- children in Polly's eyes but of the age she'd been the first time she'd come to Jackson Square-- rose from a table tucked between the benches opposite the cathedral doors. They were tricked out in the unfortunate fashion that decreed female children dress as prostitutes in a world full of predators. "The dog, his head as high as his mistress's shoulder, walked beside her. The child's face was open and trusting. The dog's was not, and Polly was relieved. Children needed bodyguards."On the face of it, Polly's just another mother who worries too much and reads too much into innocent scenes. But she's not. She's lived in a world of predators and survived. She knows exactly what's out there that she needs to be prepared for. Her children will not have to face what she did, that is, if Polly has the least say about it.If you haven't read too many books about the twisted minds of killers (like I have), 13½ should make you jump at each creak of a floorboard or pop of an attic beam. And Polly is one character who should not be missed.
    • 4/5
      This is a departure for Nevada Barr. Rather than Anna Pigeon in a National Park, this story is about a psychotic killer on the loose. It begins in Minnesota with a young boy convicted of killing his parents and baby sister. Only his older brother survives, though severely injured. Dylan, the boy, doesn't remember murdering anyone.The story is also about a girl named Polly from Mississippi who is sick of living with her drunk mother and a series of her mother's men who fight in their trashy trailer, so she steals mom's car and runs away to New Orleans.When the two story lines mesh in New Orleans, the story gets good. It also gets frightening. There are fascinating characters such as tarot card readers who lend even more mystery. The city itself becomes a character.You find yourself racing to the climax which I found very tense but right. All of Nevada Barr's great talent is included in this well-written book, but I missed her connection with nature and will be happy to see her return to Anna Pigeon.
    • 4/5
      This book was a definate thriller. There were two main characters that pulled you into their lives and took you from their youth to their lives now living in post Katrina New Orleans. Both characters were well developed and interesting. I loved the twist in the end, though if you were really paying attention you could figure out what was going to happen long before the end. Still a very good, fast paced book.
    • 4/5
      It's always a nervous time when a series author ventures out of the safety of the familiar, but this one works. It's a thriller, not a mystery; Polly Deschamps is no Anna Pigeon; and it's set, not in a national park, but post-Katrina New Orleans. But I urge you to take a step away from the familiar, and find a clever and emotionally real story about how people with calamitous pasts can make themselves anew.
    • 4/5
      Departing from her Anna Pigeon series, Barr gives us a story of murder with a plot that moves at breathtaking speed.
    • 3/5
      Too scary/disturbing for me. Also I really did not believe the Polly/Marshall love story.
    • 3/5
      Nevada Barr's "13 ½" has a lot going for it. Right from the beginning of the book, Barr forces her readers to look through wide open eyes at the horrors happening behind the closed doors of two very different families. In a 1970 Mississippi trailer-park, a young girl suffers a horrific rape at the hands of one of her alcoholic mother's lowlife boyfriends. Meanwhile, up in Minnesota, a small eleven-year-old boy uses his father's axe to wipe out the rest of his family. An older brother, heavily bleeding from what will prove to be a near fatal wound, manages to survive only by knocking his little brother unconscious with a blow to the head. Barr pulls no punches, choosing instead to describe the rape and murders in unflinching detail - and readers making it this far will feel compelled to learn what else the author has in store for the rape victim and the "butcher boy." Unfortunately, the set-up of "13 ½" proves to be much better than the rest of the book. Barr has written a mystery/thriller but seasoned readers will find there is very little "mystery" to her mystery, and they will be reduced to reading the rest of the book mostly to verify their early suspicions. What happens decades later when Polly Farmer, the rape victim, and the Butcher Boy cross paths in post-Katrina New Orleans becomes more and more predictable and less and less believable as the story races toward its climax. Barr uses flashbacks for one of the more interesting episodes of the novel, the period during which the eleven-year-old murderer is placed inside a facility for young offenders. He is to be held there until, at age 18, he will be transferred to a men's prison to serve the rest of his sentence. Because the boy is three or four years younger than everyone else in the center, authorities are reduced to locking him inside a hospital room for his own protection for the first several days they have him. Dylan Raines, though is a perceptive boy, and he easily adapts to the mores and requirements of living among the petty criminals and bullies surrounding him (including some of the guards). He uses his infamy as a mass murderer to good advantage but, as is often the case, jail changes him in ways that make him more a criminal now than he was when he went in. Flash forward to 2007 New Orleans where Polly is now a respected English professor, divorced with two daughters, and Dylan is a wealthy architect. The two meet in a small city park where Polly sometimes comes to read and they feel an immediate attraction to one another. Will it be a fatal attraction for Polly? "13 ½" has the makings of an exceptional thriller but several of its main characters are so over-the-top that it is difficult to identify with the ones that are intended to be sympathetic. The exaggerated characters often border on cliché and give the book such a strong feeling of unreality, almost parody, that it is difficult to take seriously the dangers faced by Polly and her daughters. That is not a good thing in a thriller that could have been so much better than it is. Rated at: 2.5
    • 1/5
      Disclaimer: I didn't finish this one. Mine was an audio version. It opens with this passage describing brutal child rape. In detail. The reader is a man, and he sounds...excited. Way too porny - and not in the fun way. I figured I'd give it a chance, so I skipped around the chapters. Bored by the prospect of listening to more of this jumbled mess, I deleted the file.
    • 3/5
      A young girl escapes her trailer trash mother and ends up in New Orleans. An 11-year-old boy kills his parents and sister and his older brother sticks up for him. When the younger brother is finally released from juvenile detention into his brother's custody, they try to start over in New Orleans. The girl, Polly, meets a man named Marshall who is very close to his older brother, Danny. You guessed it - Marshall and Dylan are The Butcher Boy and his brother and Polly and her two daughters are in danger. Unfortunately, the way the novel is constructed, the reader knows the author is being purposely vague and trying to lead the reader to believe one thing so that she can spring a twist at the end. The ending is not much of a surprise but at least Barr's plot twist is adequately explained. The final "scene" adds a unique finishing touch to a subplot that runs most of the length of the book. Contains depictions of graphic violence and profanity.
    • 3/5
      When Polly Farmer was just 15, she escaped her alcoholic mother and a future that seemed to lead straight from one trailer park into another by running away to New Orleans. There, she was able to put together a life for herself, ending up many years later as a successful English professor, divorced with two daughters. One day in Jackson Square, she is approached by the handsome and charming Marshall Marchand, and there is an instant connection between the two. Neither has been in love before, really, and now both are head over heels. When Polly's two daughters find themselves taken with Marshall as well, and when Marshall tops everything off by heroically saving the three from a house-fire, Polly takes the plunge and marries him, despite the small amount of time they've known each other.But Marshall is hiding some dark secrets of his own. He's really Dylan Raines, who, as an 11-year-old, brutally ax-murdered his parents and baby sister--though he doesn't have any memory of having done so. Released early due to the tireless efforts of his older brother Richard, Dylan has moved to New Orleans, changed his name, and tried to put together a life for himself under the careful eye of Richard, now known as Danny.When Polly receives an ominous tarot card reading predicting that she will kill her own husband, the idyllic life she's imagined begins to fall apart. She finds the tarot reader murdered mere days later, and then discovers a cache of letters, journal entries, and newspaper clippings that seem to indicate Marshall is completely unbalanced and considering committing more brutal murders. Now Polly must fight to discover the truth about her new husband while protecting herself and her two girls against the evil that's entered their lives.Enjoyable, fast-paced, and quite intense, 13 1/2 is not a book you'll want to put down!