Would have been better without the "accents".

Many years ago, I remember a series on TV which was based in Europe (Germany, I think). Viewers wrote in to comment that the actors were not speaking with German accents, but instead with their normal British ones. The response was that, if you were in another country and conversing with fellow countrymen, your accents would appear to each other to be "normal" - therefore, if you are going to have the actors speaking in English, they should sound British.
I hope I've explained this OK, as that is what I feel about this narration.
I read the book many years ago and wondered how the narrator would deal with the various accents, so was interested to listen.
I accept that, applying the above principle, if a French person were speaking to another French person, they would sound to each other as we would to other Brits - however, if you had a French person speaking to a German one, the concept of an "accent" WOULD apply. As this book has a mixture of such dialogue, that wouldn't work. However, as the main narration is in a British accent, I feel it jars a little when the narrator drops into a different accent.
In the case of the French accents - a little "Allo, Allo"-ish!
That does give the added complication of the American accents, which would sound American, rather than British, to our ears (pity Sydney Sheldon hadn't based the non-European characters in Britain, instead of the USA!) - but I still think the French characters, especially when talking to each other in what is, presumably, their own language, would benefit from the approach of having the dialogue in the same accent as the narration of the plot.
Nit-picking , I know - but the slightly phoney-sounding French accents do detract a little from the narration of the story!

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