‘With a Kiss We Die’ Brings a Double Murder, a Book, and a Podcast to UC Santa Barbara’s Theater Department

From authors Matt Dorff and Suzanne Dunn, who write under the name L. R. Dorn, comes a true crime podcast experience with a local spin. Their newest book, With a Kiss We Die, is written in the form of a Serial-style podcast, narrated by investigative journalist, Ryanna Raines. Throughout the chapters, Raines gets involved with suspects in the brutal murder of a wealthy, middle-aged couple. The suspects are the couple’s son and his girlfriend, both UCSB theater students. They claim their innocence — so who’s the real murderer?

In creating the audiobook for this title, the authors wanted a multi-voice style of read-through, rather than a single narrator, to mirror the experience of a podcast. And who better to hire as voice actors than the actual UCSB BFA acting students? The authors and their publisher, HarperCollins, partnered with academic advisor Sean O’Shea to seek the perfect voices for the project. The result of the multi-voice reading bears a striking verisimilitude to an actual podcast, making the audiobook an immersive listening experience that places the audience in the midst of the high-profile murder investigation. 

“This is our grand experiment,” says Dorff, “to cast these theater students, college students who had no audiobook experience before this … .Their training is theatrical, to project to an audience, and audiobook recording is a very intimate medium. It’s just you and the microphone.”