Harry Potter is in a bit of trouble: he’s accidentally blown up an awful woman, his uncle’s sister, and now he’s on the lam and expecting to be expelled from Hogwarts. (She’s blown up like a balloon, I should say, not like C4.) When ministry officials find Harry at the Leaky Cauldron, they’re surprisingly relieved – and not at all wrathful.   There’s a serial killer on the loose, it seems, and one who has a connection to the awful night that Harry Potter’s parents were killed and Harry himself was left with a strange scar on his forehead. Although there are many funny bits here,  Azkaban starts the series’ ramping up of drama and seriousness – or should I say siriusness?  There’s an increasing feeling of forebodingness and besiegement here, as the spectral ghouls who are ‘guarding’ the castle from the killer Sirius Black drain joy and hope from the kids, and fear soars when Black appears to have been able to find a way to sneak inside the school regardless.

Reviewing this title almost seems a pointless exercise, following so closely on the heels of my other full-cast audio reviews.  We have some new voices now, of course, primarily Remus Lupin and Sirius Black.   Lupin’s casting is excellent, I think;  Black took some getting used to, but part of his ‘roughness’ may owe to the story itself.  Ditto the casting of Trelawney:  her breathy voice, varying tone and inflections are all profoundly irritating, but given her interactions with the trio – especially Hermione – I think that’s intentional.  Snape’s voice actor continues to underwhelm, especially when he’s being emotional: this is funny in one scene, where he’s positively whining to Fudge that he simply doesn’t appreciate what a nuisance Potter is. I think the ambient or atmospheric sounds – characters reacting in the background,  trunks being opened, crickets chirping – has been raised a bit, but I am not positive. I listened to the previous books while driving in my car, so they were contending with the motor, the highway, and so on, whereas I listened to a lot of this book from my PC soundbar.  There were a couple of scenes in which the amount of simultaneous audio (effects, music, and dialogue) pushed into interfering with one another, but only to a minor degree. Music, as mentioned in my first review, is used sparingly and typically to good effect..

All told, this was another wonderful entry in the full cast series. The books are going to get darker and longer, but even so — I look forward to the upcoming releases — one a month from February until May.