The Paris Apartment

Featuring outstanding performances from six narrators—Clare Corbett, Daphne Kouma, Julia Winwood, Sope Dirisu, Sofia Zervudachi, and Charlie Anson—this twisty, atmospheric, locked-room mystery (whose film rights have already been picked up by Sony’s 3000 Pictures) is a pleasingly theatrical listening experience, despite rapid-fire temporal and points of view shifts. Jess Hadley experiences some unpleasantries with her boss and hightails it out of her job at the Copacabana bar in Brighton, England. She arrives at a swanky but somewhat sinister Paris apartment building, where she hopes to crash with her brother Ben, an aspiring investigative journalist. When she can’t get Ben on the phone, Jess finagles her way into the building and finds her brother’s wallet and keys in his apartment, but Ben is nowhere to be found. The suspense builds as the first-person point of view moves among the building’s other residents, with each narrator effectively portraying their character’s growing dread over Jess’s investigation into Ben’s disappearance.