I don't know what y'all are talking about with the audio quality. I didn't notice anything, though maybe the road noise proved beneficial this time and blocked it out. I had no trouble understanding any part of the story.
I'm pretty lukewarm on this story, as I was with the other Bordertown story run on EA. I don't know, I guess I just don't love Bordertown, and I'm in no rush to pick up the book. (The Amal-El-Mohtar song was awesome, but since the audio recording is not part of the book I'm still not rushing to pick it up. I would pay some money to get that song as a standalone on an mp3 though)
As with the other Bordertown story, things happen, and there are characters who seem like real people. But as with that story, in the end, nothing happened that I had any interest in. In this one it seemed like it was too unfocused, too many plotlines without devoting enough time to any of them for me to really give a crap, and made even less compelling by the fact that I'm not intimately familiar with this world. The three main plots I saw:
--The mystery of who attacked Ashley, who killed the girl, and why. At the beginning this seemed to be the central drive of the plot, but then they solve it nonchalantly and the story goes on. "Oh, he's drying out Mad River water and selling it as drugs and was using the girl as a drug mule." So... what is Mad River water? Is that supposed to mean something to me? It seemed like it was making a profound solution to the question of why she was coughing red, but I didn't feel like I had enough information for this to be anything profound. Like solving a murder mystery with "The butler did it. Oh, by the way, there is a butler, who no one has mentioned."
--The mystery of the Rowan Gentleman. So someone claims they've seen some mythical figure. It seemed like it was supposed to be a huge reveal when the League of Extraordinary Rowan Gentlemen were revealed, but I was like "Wait, who is the Rowan Gentleman supposed to be again? Why do I care?" I have not read the Scarlet Pimpernel, but this still seemed overly familiar to me, from Batman, V for Vendetta, Phantom of the Opera, other movies where a masked figure is revealed to be more than one person wearing similar masks.
--The romance with Alain (which I too kept hearing as Alain). So, at the end, the aloof lazily courting uncaring elf trying to court her turns out that this was all to maintain his identity. I found him such a boring character throughout, such a strict stereotype of an elf character with no discerning qualities that when he suddenly revealed "I'm really different from all the other elves" this still didn't convince me that he wasn't boring and without appeal. Especially since this is all something that a stereotypical elf might say, since at this point it's only words and not actual action.
I did listen all the way through, so I guess that says something, but in the end I found it very unremarkable.