I love Twin Peaks.
I have recently re-submerged myself in the shows original first two seasons from the 90's in order to prepare for the new season coming to Showtime 25 years later!
What I love most about the show, among all its many great elements, is the character of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper, expertly portrayed by David Lynch's frequent leading man, the great Kyle MacLachlan.
Agent Cooper is admirably quirky, a fierce lover of "damn fine" hot black coffee and diner pie. With a smile on his face, he says things like, "Theres nothing quite like urinating in open air. " A detective whose approach is unconventional and unorthodox yet he proves to be a skillful, competent and proficient man of the law. In a world of evil he is the embodiment of true good. I found this sort of character with an always-true-north moral compass boring in other stories like what's his name in Leviathan Wakes. But that is not the case here. Cooper is a complex, dynamic and extremely believable character whose qualities we could all use in a fellow human being. Audrey Horn told Coop that his only flaw is that he's perfect. But as viewers, we know that he's not. He's human like the rest of us and therefore susceptible to bleeding.(Which he does, taking a gunshot with an insane amount of composure.)
This "book" collects all of Cooper's letters recorded on cassette tapes that he sent to Diane, of whom me know very little. With the letters, you can kind of piece together a story. I would advise you to just watch the show instead. It's amazing.
Most of the entries are lifted straight off the show. There is very little new material here, and the new material that there is, written by Scott Frost (brother of the show's co-creator Mark Frost) feels inauthentic.
Another complaint is that "story"/ Cooper's tapes stop before the case has even been solved, quite abruptly, in fact, bookended with jazzy detective music instead of more material. It kinda feels like they just slapped this together to make a quick buck while the show was piping hot.
I picked this audiobook up on Audible through Amazon Prime at $5.99; I couldn't pass up that price. A little of the novelty is lost by listening to it on an Ipad instead of a cassette tape as it was produced originally, but I'm glad to have gotten 45 minutes of entertainment out of it anyways.
And it is Kyle MacLachlan himself that performed the new material. Of course his performance is amazing; there just is not that much substance here.