You can pick up the unabridged audio of The Monstrous Regiment at bookcloseouts.com for $7.49. I think this is a great deal. Since I go through Audio Books at the rate of about one every ten days, I am always looking for used or cheap books on tape.

If you have read one Discworld book, you haven't read them all. The Monstrous Regiment has much in common with The Thief of Time, the Pratchett audio book that I listened to last August.

The book is a fun, pun filled, look at the army of Borogrovia. It pokes fun at sex roles, politics, religion and genre novels. Pratchett had fun writing the book and I had fun reading it.

The general McGuffin is that a girl joins the army disguised as a boy in order to find her missing brother. This sets off one funny situation after another. It is a very slight premise, but Pratchett continually finds new ways to milk it for another laugh.

Overall, the book does not hold up in comparison to The Thief of Time. The reader, Stephan Briggs does a good job, although a female voice might have been more appropriate. The plot, however, is a fairly straight-line to the logical, ad absurdum, conclusion of the original idea. Pratchett assumes familiarity with previous Discworld books and does not spend much time introducing the usual cast of characters such as Igors, Trolls, and Vampires. Harper Audio does a piss poor job of production, compared to Blackstone or Booksontape.com.

I am zipping this one off to Ward. This book will appeal more to his personal sense of Humor. He is big fan of Douglas Adams and he enjoyed Thief of Time.

Next Book: Find a Victim by Ross McDonald (not spec-fic). My mom bought this at a local library for $2.00. I am finished with tape 1 of 5 so I should be reporting back on this one soon.