For the Sake of the Game

Laurie R. King is the New York Times bestselling author of numerous books, including the Mary Russell-Sherlock Holmes stories. She has won or been nominated for a multitude of prizes and is probably the only writer to have both an Edgar Award and an honorary doctorate in theology. She was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars in 2010.

Leslie S. Klinger is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Sherlock Holmes. He is the editor of the three-volume The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes. The first two volumes, The Complete Short Stories, won the Edgar for “Best Critical/ Biographical” work. Klinger is a member of the Baker Street Irregulars and lives in Malibu, California.

Read by Grover Gardner, Simon Vance, Derek Perkins, Julie McKay, James Langton, Marisa Calin, Ralph Lister, Suzanne Elise Freeman, James Patrick Cronin, Andrew Eiden, Scott Brick, Emily Sutton-Smith, Keith Szarabajka, and Justine Eyre

Simon Vance is the critically acclaimed narrator of approximately 400 audiobooks, winner of 27 AudioFile Earphones Awards, and a 12-time Audie Award-winner. He won an Audie in 2006 in the category of Science Fiction and was named the 2011 Best Voice in Biography and History and in 2010 Best Voice in Fiction by AudioFile magazine. 

 Vance has been a narrator for the past 25 years, and also worked for many years as a BBC Radio presenter and newsreader in London.  Some of his best-selling and most praised audiobook performances include Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies (an Audie award-winner), Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series (all 21 titles), the new productions of Frank Herbert’s original Dune series, and Rob Gifford’s China Road (an AudioFile 2007 Book of the Year). Vance lives near San Francisco with his wife and two sons.

Narrator for this audio book is Derek Perkins.

Julie McKay is a renowned audiobook narrator who received her bachelor's degree from Baldwin-Wallace University. She went on to perform both classical theater and musical theater regionally. She has over 150 titles to her name. A Los Angeles based narrator, she maintains a residence in New York, where she also keeps her heart.

James Langton trained as an actor at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. An AudioFile Earphones Award winner, he has performed many voice-overs and narrated numerous audiobooks, including the international bestseller The Brotherhood of the Holy Shroud by Julia Navarro. He is also a professional musician who led the internationally renowned Pasadena Roof Orchestra from 1996 to 2002. James was born in York, England, and is now based in New York City.

Marisa Calin is an actress, narrator, and novelist born in England and educated in New York at the American Academy of the Dramatic Arts. An artist with a flair for everything literary, she has written a young adult novel, You & Me, which received a Kirkus Starred Review, and has narrated the audio books Ruby Red and Sapphire Blue by Kerstin Gier.

Born in one of the unlikeliest of places-on the desk of the British High Commissioner in New Delhi, India-native British stage and film actor Ralph Lister lives happily in whatever reality he finds himself. His Audie-nominated audiobook work and best actor awards for both stage and film (2011 Grand Award and 2014 Eclipse Award, respectively) have led him into the delightfully strange worlds of the many characters he embodies in voice. Ralph has narrated more than one hundred audiobooks and directed over a dozen others, across all genres, both fiction and nonfiction. Now a U.S. citizen, Ralph shares his time between his homes in Michigan and Los Angeles, where he also continues his passion for on-camera acting. Recent film credits include roles in OZ: The Great and Powerful, Setup, Alleged, and Mickey Matson and the Pirate's Code, and his television credits include a role on the AMC crime drama Low Winter Sun.

Suzanne Elise Freeman spent her childhood watching her father act on stage, and causing mischief in the booth while he was on-air for the local radio station. She inherited her love of storytelling from him (even playing his daughter in On Golden Pond), and her passion for reading from her mother. Suzanne now works as a narrator and professional actor in projects ranging from television and movies to Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde. Born and raised in Minnesota, Suzanne now makes her home in Los Angeles.

James Patrick Cronin is an Earphones Award–winning narrator who has recorded over one hundred audiobooks across an extensive range of genres.

Coming from a long line of theater folk, Andrew Eiden has been acting since the age of four, working at regional theaters from the Glendale Center Theatre to the Pasadena Playhouse. At the age of eleven Andrew was scouted by his first agent after winning first place in a local drama festival and has since starred in dozens of national commercials and guest spotted on television shows for FOX, NBC, ABC, CBS, and Nickelodeon. He has been a series regular on three different shows: Discovery Channel's Outward Bound, Disney Channel's Movie Surfers, and ABC's Complete Savages.

Scott Brick first began narrating audiobooks in 2000, and after recording almost 400 titles in five years, AudioFile magazine named Brick a Golden Voice and “one of the fastest-rising stars in the audiobook galaxy.” He has read a number of titles in Frank Herbert’s bestselling Dune series, and he won the 2003 Science Fiction Audie Award for Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. Brick has narrated for many popular authors, including Michael Pollan, Joseph Finder, Tom Clancy, and Ayn Rand. He has also won over 40 AudioFile Earphones Awards and the AudioFile award for Best Voice in Mystery and Suspense 2011. In 2007, Brick was named Publishers Weekly’s Narrator of the Year.

 Brick has performed on film, television and radio. He appeared on stage throughout the United States in productions of Cyrano, Hamlet, Macbeth and other plays. In addition to his acting work, Brick choreographs fight sequences, and was a combatant in films including Romeo and Juliet, The Fantasticks and Robin Hood: Men in Tights. He has also been hired by Morgan Freeman to write the screenplay adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama.

Emily Sutton-Smith is a professional actress and one of the cofounders of an Equity theater in central Michigan. Her stage credits include Out of Orbit; Doublewide; Summer Retreat; Too Much, Too Much, Too Many; Miracle on South Division Street; End Days; The Usual: A Musical Love Story; The Smell of the Kill; The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds; Maidens, Mothers and Crones; and Additional Particulars. A New York City native, she has worked onstage at almost all the Equity theaters in Michigan, including the Williamston Theatre, the Purple Rose Theatre, Performance Network Theatre, Tipping Point Theatre, the Detroit Rep, the Jewish Ensemble Theatre, and MeadowBrook Theatre. Emily is a proud member of the Actors' Equity Association and SAG/AFTRA. Her film and TV credits include The Funeral Guest, Gifted Hands, Butterfly Effect: Revelation, The Prince of Motor City, and Nevermore. Emily studied acting at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York City, and holds a Grande Diploma in Pastry Arts from the French Culinary Institute. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Michigan State University.

Keith Szarabajka has appeared in many films, including The Dark Knight, Missing, and A Perfect World, and on such television shows as The Equalizer, Angel, Cold Case, Golden Years, and Profit. Szarabajka has also appeared in several episodes of Selected Shorts for National Public Radio. He won the 2001 Audie Award for Unabridged Fiction for his reading of Tom Robbins’s Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and has won several Earphones Awards.

Justine Eyre has turned her passion for reading and remarkable facility with accents into her dream career. This classically trained, multilingual actress has narrated well over 400 audiobooks and has been honored to receive a coveted Audie Award and multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards. Appearing in leading roles onstage in King Lear and The Crucible, she has also graced the screen in Two and Half Men and Mad Men amongst her many television credits.