If you like prior Carl tales, this will easily entertain even it feels a bit meandering/directionless at times. The main narrator (Hays) continues to show amazing VA skills.
But the final audio quality is worse than before and it already wasn’t great in prior books. My utterly inexpert guess is the final result is a combination of decent but not great recording and engineering multiplied by a truly awful codec/compression process and possibly overuse of cheap post production effects even for narration where we’d expect only natural voice.
I recommend listening on the cheapest/worst audio setup you have. Anything good will faithfully reproduce artifacts and distortions while cheap ‘phones seem to muffle and smooth it all out into a poor but inoffensive audio puree.
For the past decade, when awake I’ve almost always been listening to an audiobook, a podcast, or even narration heavy Youtube. So variable quality is something I’m pretty familiar with. This book is unique in terms of being such a modern recordings with such bad quality. Shame to inflict that on people as talented as Hays et al.