Category: Books

Wow, this is a long audiobook. Just looking at the length of it at 36 hours 27 minutes, I know that sounds long but it is nothing compared to just how long this book feels. I repeatedly thought the story was winding down and coming to an end only to have it pick back up again and go on for hours longer. But don’t let that fool you.

This is a really good book and an amazing story. The Great North Road is an epic story spanning multiple worlds, aliens that are truly alien, and a human race that is in fear of extinction.

The Angela character and her story really got me, she was easily my favorite character in the story with Sid being a close second. People doing the hard thing because they think it is the only choice they have that will result in a better life for their family. Really good stuff.

Toby Longworth does an admirable job trying to give each character a unique voice, but there are so many characters that it is an impossible task and from time-to-time I was quite confused about who was speaking and even where the speakers were, what world they were on.

Don’t let any of that stop you from reading or listening to this book though. If you have the patience for really long space operas, this is Peter F. Hamilton after all, you will really like this one.

From the publisher:

A century from now, thanks to a technology allowing instantaneous travel across light-years, humanity has solved its energy shortages, cleaned up the environment, and created far-flung colony worlds. The keys to this empire belong to the powerful North family – composed of successive generations of clones. Yet these clones are not identical. For one thing, genetic errors have crept in with each generation. For another, the original three clone “brothers” have gone their separate ways, and the branches of the family are now friendly rivals more than allies.

Or maybe not so friendly. At least that’s what the murder of a North clone in the English city of Newcastle suggests to Detective Sidney Hurst. Sid is a solid investigator who’d like nothing better than to hand off this hot potato of a case. The way he figures it, whether he solves the crime or not, he’ll make enough enemies to ruin his career. Yet Sid’s case is about to take an unexpected turn: Because the circumstances of the murder bear an uncanny resemblance to a killing that took place years ago on the planet St. Libra, where a North clone and his entire household were slaughtered in cold blood.

The convicted slayer, Angela Tramelo, has always claimed her innocence. And now it seems she may have been right. Because only the St. Libra killer could have committed the Newcastle crime. Problem is, Angela also claims that the murderer was an alien monster.

Now Sid must navigate through a Byzantine minefield of competing interests within the police department and the world’s political and economic elite…all the while hunting down a brutal killer poised to strike again. And on St. Libra, Angela, newly released from prison, joins a mission to hunt down the elusive alien, only to learn that the line between hunter and hunted is a thin one.

©2012 Peter F. Hamilton (P)2013 Tantor

I rate Great North Road an 8 out of 10 and recommend to anyone who loves a good space opera.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Off to Be the Wizard. The 8-bit artwork on the cover and the fact I recently re-listened to Ready Player One had me in a certain mindset that didn’t match this story at all.

But just a little ways into this book I found myself really enjoying it. And the more I listened the more I liked it. By the end of the book I was cheering and laughing out loud.

Luke Daniels does a fantastic job bringing the characters to life and giving each one of them a unique voice.

The entire story is full geeky goodness with pop-culture references throughout along with plenty of dry humor. I can’t wait to listen to Spell or High Water the sequel to Off to Be the Wizard.

From the publisher:

It’s a simple story. Boy finds proof that reality is a computer program. Boy uses program to manipulate time and space. Boy gets in trouble. Boy flees back in time to Medieval England to live as a wizard while he tries to think of a way to fix things. Boy gets in more trouble.

Oh, and boy meets girl at some point.

Off to Be the Wizard is a light, comedic novel about computers, time travel, and human stupidity, written by Scott Meyer, the creator of the internationally known comic strip Basic Instructions.

Magic will be made! Legends will be created! Stew will be eaten!

©2013 Scott Meyer (P)2013 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved.

I rate Off to Be the Wizard a 9 out of 10 and recommend it to anyone looking for a fun geeky comedy.

Skin Game is the 15th book in the Harry Dresden series and James Marsters turns in another amazing job with the narration.

I enjoyed the whole breaking into the vault part of the story, but the rest of it left me a little dry. It s a good story, but it doesn’t rise to the kind of greatness that I have come to expect from the Desden series. Having said that, I am on the edge of my seat waiting for the next book in the series.

From the publisher:

Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, is about to have a very bad day.…

Because as Winter Knight to the Queen of Air and Darkness, Harry never knows what the scheming Mab might want him to do. Usually, it’s something awful.

He doesn’t know the half of it.…

Mab has just traded Harry’s skills to pay off one of her debts. And now he must help a group of supernatural villains – led by one of Harry’s most dreaded and despised enemies, Nicodemus Archleone – to break into the highest-security vault in town, so that they can then access the highest-security vault in the Nevernever.

It’s a smash-and-grab job to recover the literal Holy Grail from the vaults of the greatest treasure hoard in the supernatural world – which belongs to the one and only Hades, Lord of the freaking Underworld and generally unpleasant character. Worse, Dresden suspects that there is another game afoot that no one is talking about. And he’s dead certain that Nicodemus has no intention of allowing any of his crew to survive the experience. Especially Harry.

Dresden’s always been tricky, but he’s going to have to up his backstabbing game to survive this mess – assuming his own allies don’t end up killing him before his enemies get the chance.…

©2014 Jim Butcher (P)2014 Penguin Audio

I rate Skin Game 7 out of 10 and recommend you read Storm Front and the other Harry Dresden books before this one.

I absolutely love this audiobook, I think this is my third time listening to it. The combination of Ernest Cline’s writing and Wil Wheaton are an amazing geeky combination of greatness.

A co-worker recently commented that Ready Player One was pandering to geeks like me, my response was that I DON’T CARE! If I could get more people to pander to me the way this book does my life would be wonderful.

If you are a geek of the 80’s you NEED to read or listen to this book ASAP.

I rate this book an 11 out of 10 and recommend it to all geeks and nerds.

After finishing American Assassin I jumped straight into Kill Shot: An American Assassin Thriller to continue with the Mitch Rapp series.

I really enjoyed the first book and I think this second one is even better. There is more spy-like action with double-crossing and backstabbing.

What I liked most about this story is that the ancillary characters are well fleshed out and I found myself caring for them and excited about their part in the story. I would love to read a series of books with the lead police detective from Paris as the protagonist.

George Guidall does a great job reading the book with his usual fatherly pace and timbre.

From the publisher:

#1 New York Times best-selling author Vince Flynn is back with another nail-biting political thriller that follows the young Mitch Rapp on a deadly mission to hunt down the men responsible for the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack.

For months, Mitch Rapp has been steadily working his way through a list of men, bullet by bullet. With each kill, the tangled network of monsters responsible for the slaughter of 270 civilians becomes increasingly clear. He is given his next target: a plump Libyan diplomat who is prone to drink and is currently in Paris without a single bodyguard.

Rapp finds him completely unprotected and asleep in his bed. With confidence in his well-honed skills and conviction of the man’s guilt, he easily sends a bullet into the man’s skull. But in the split second it takes the bullet to leave the silenced pistol, everything changes. The door to the hotel room is kicked open and gunfire erupts all around Rapp. In an instant the hunter has become the hunted. Rapp is left wounded and must flee for his life.

The next morning, the news breaks in Washington that Libya’s Oil Minister has been killed along with three innocent civilians and four unidentified men. The French authorities are certain that the gunman is wounded and on the loose in Paris. As the finger pointing begins, Rapp’s handlers have only one choice – deny any responsibility for the incident and pray that their newest secret weapon stays that way, avoiding capture and dying quietly. One person in the group, however, is not prone to leaving things to chance. Rapp has become a liability, and he absolutely cannot be allowed to be taken alive by the French authorities. But it will soon become clear that nothing is more dangerous than a wounded and cornered Mitch Rapp.

©2012 Vince Flynn (P)2012 Simon & Schuster Audio

I rate Kill Shot a 7 out of 10 and recommend to fans of spy thrillers.

Dead Eye is the fourth Gray Man series of novels and is narrated by Jay Snider who nails his performance.

Court Gentry is taking a break while recuperating from the happenings in Ballistic when a man approaches him who has same training as Court. I found a lot of this story to be obvious, there were very few surprises for me, but that may have been Mark Greaney’s intention when he wrote it. It may have been his intention to keep the story very straightforward with the action flowing along at a steady pace.

I really like the combination of characters in this novel. The killer named Dead Eye is contrasted by Ruth the Mossad agent. Dead Eye thinks his skills match Court’s point-for-point and his overconfidence is his downfall. While Ruth’s quick evaluation of who Court really is and the risks she takes to do the right thing in all things makes her a polar opposite to Dead Eye. I think it is great story telling technique.

I bought this audiobook from Audible and listened to it on my iPhone using the Audible app.

From the publisher:

Ex-CIA master assassin Court Gentry has always prided himself on his ability to disappear at will, to fly below the radar and exist in the shadows – to survive as the near-mythical Gray Man. But when he takes revenge upon a former employer who betrayed him, he exposes himself to something he’s never had to face before.

A killer who is just like him.

Code-named Dead Eye, Russell Whitlock is a graduate of the same ultra-secret Autonomous Asset Program that trained and once controlled Gentry. But now, Whitlock is a free agent who has been directed to terminate his fellow student of death. He knows how his target thinks, how he moves, and how he kills. And he knows the best way to do the job is to make Gentry run for his life – right up until the moment Dead Eye finally ends it.

©2013 Mark Strode Greaney (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

I rate Dead Eye a 7 out of 10 and recommend it to anyone who enjoys spy and action novels.

Ballistic is easily my favorite Gray Man novel. The flashback story about how he met Eddie and formed a deep friendship with him is amazing writing. The pictures Mark Greaney paints of the large gun fights in this story blow me away, I really felt like I was watching it all inside my head and could picture everything like I was watching it in a movie theater or in a really great video game.

In fact I was playing the PC video game Far Cry 3 at the same time I was playing this game. I think the Gray Man really affected how approached playing the video game and made it an even better experience. There are a couple of places in the game that loosely fit in with some of the locales in the book, that combination took both the book and video game to another level for me.

For the third time in a row Jay Snider hits a home run and brings all of the characters to life. I was amazed to learn that Jay Snider has recorded 112 programs on Audible, that is an amazing body of work and I look forwarded to listening to more of them.

I bought this audiobook from Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone.

From the publisher:

Ex-CIA assassin Court Gentry thought he could find refuge living in the Amazon rain forest. But his bloody past finds him when a vengeful Russian crime lord forces him to go on the run once again. Court makes his way to one of the only men in the world he can trust – and arrives too late. His friend is dead and buried.
Years before, Eddie Gamboa had saved Court’s life. Now, Eddie has been murdered by the notorious Mexican drug cartel he fought to take down. And Court soon finds himself drawn into a war he never wanted. But in this war, there are no sides – only survivors….

©2011 Mark Strode Greaney (P)2011 Audible, Inc.

I rate this book a 9 out of 10 and highly recommend it to any fans of spy and action stories.

This is the second book in Larry Correia and Mike Kupari’s "Dead Six" series and it packs all of the punch and kick as the first Dead Six book.

Holy Cow! I am loving these books.

Lorenzo and Valentine are such great characters and the team of Correia and Kupari keep adding more and more depth to them. I really love these characters.

In this story the ancillary characters step-up in a big way. We get to learn more about them as they take on larger roles in the story. It is characters like these that make stories raise above being just good to being GREAT!

From the publisher:

The hard-hitting sequel to groundbreaking military adventure Dead Six.

On the far side of the world, deep in former Soviet Central Asia, lies a stronghold called the Crossroads. It is run with an iron fist by a brutal warlord calling himself Sala Jihan. He is far more than a petty dictator, for Jihan holds the fate of nations in his grasp. To save a world slipping into chaos, Jihan must either fall or be controlled.
One secret military organization called Exodus plans to see that this happens. For this mission, they need the best of the best. Unfortunately the man they need is rotting in an almost unassailable foreign prison.

Enter Lorenzo, thief extraordinaire. Lorenzo is now retired, happily married, and living in paradise. His Achilles heel: an FBI-agent brother who has gone missing – disappeared into the stronghold of warlord Jihan. Exodus promises to give Lorenzo his chance to rescue his brother if and only if Lorenzo will perform one service for them: break Michael Valentine out of a captivity from which no one has ever emerged alive.

And if Lorenzo can accomplish that – well then, the Crossroads awaits the sword of Exodus.

©2013 Larry Correia, Mike Kupari (P)2014 Audible Inc.

I rate Swords of Exodus a 9 out of 10 and recommend it to anyone who love a good action story.

I am a spy/thriller rampage!

Dead Six is another excellent book from Larry Correia along with Mike Kupari. As with all Larry Correia stories the characters in this one are absolutely amazing.

With two lead characters, Valentine and Lorenzo, the story bounces back and forth between the two with amazing timing leaving me on the edge of my seat time and time again. An amazing juggling act that could have easily fallen apart at any time but Larry and Mike keep all of the balls in the air throughout the entire story. Such great writing.

Bronson Pinchot turns-in yet another amazing performance bringing all of the characters to life. I did have a few flashbacks to other books I have listened to recently that were also narrated by Bronson, but it wasn’t all that distracting, more like hearing from a long lost friend.

I bought this book from Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone.

From the publisher:

Michael Valentine, veteran and former member of an elite private military company, has been recruited by the government to conduct a secret counter-terror operation in the Persian Gulf nation of Zubara. The unit is called Dead Six. Their mission is to take the fight to the enemy and not get caught. Lorenzo, assassin and thief extraordinaire, is being blackmailed by the world’s most vicious crime lord. His team has to infiltrate the Zubaran terrorist network and pull off an impossible heist or his family will die. When Dead Six compromises his objective, Lorenzo has a new job: Find and kill Valentine. As allegiances are betrayed and the nation descends into a bloody civil war, Lorenzo and Valentine must face off. Two men. Two missions. Only one will win.

©2011 Larry Correia, Mike Kupari (P)2014 Audible Inc.

I rate Dead Six a 9 out of 10 and recommend it to fans of spy/thriller and action novels.

Larry Correia knocks it out of the park yet again with his tale of war in a fantasy setting full of technology mingled with magic. For the first time I really enjoyed a story full of steampunk motifs and hard sci-fi based war.

It appears that this story is set in a WarMachine, WarHammer, Iron Kingdoms miniature gaming setting. Normally this would not work for me, I took a look at some of the WarHammer books awhile back and they are not the type of book I would read. But Larry Correia has brought this type of story to a new level.

Into the Storm is character driven with lots of insight into the drives and desires of the characters who are all doing their best to fight for what they believe in. Great stuff.

The narration by Ray Porter is very good, his voice easily transitions from a gravely old man to a young soldier bringing all of the characters to life.

I bought this audiobook on Audible and listened to it using the Audible app on my iPhone.

From the publisher:

A knight of Cygnar follows a strict moral code. His integrity is beyond reproach. He holds himself to the highest standards whether dealing with friend or foe. And he values honor above all.

The year is 606 AR, and Cygnar has been sorely pressed by its enemies both at home and abroad. In Caspia, the conflict with the Protectorate is about to erupt into full war with the looming invasion of Sul. The Cygnaran military is desperate for soldiers with the skill, strength, and bravery to take up the devastating galvanic weaponry of the new Storm Division. In this climate, every soldier is valuable, even those fallen from the honor expected of a Storm Knight. A group of such men – thieves, drunkards, and worse – comprise the Sixth Platoon. All they need is someone to lead them.

Lieutenant Hugh Madigan, a peerless warrior knighted during the reign of deposed King Vinter IV, has spent years in obscurity, punished for his loyalty to the former king. Now he has been ordered back to the front and given command of the Sixth, his task to turn a platoon of miscreants into elite soldiers fit to be called Storm Knights. Time is short, and war is coming. One way or another, Lieutenant Madigan must lead his men into the storm….

©2013 Privateer Press (P)2014 Audible Inc.

I rate Into the Storm an 8 out of 10 and recommend it to fans of books based on miniature gaming universes and anyone who needs a little more Larry Correia in their life.

After reading the Gray Man series of books I still had a desire for more spy action. In one of the review of Dead Eye Vince Flynn was mentioned so I looked him up and found the Mitch Rapp series. The first book in the series is American Assassin so I picked it up from Audible and gave it a listen.

American Assassin is the first novel in the Mitch Rapp series written by Vince Flynn. This is a traditional superagent spy novel with more action than intrigue. I think it would make for a fantastic movie, especially if shot like the spy action-thriller movies of the 70’s. Mitch Rapp is a likable character with flaws that make him human.

The narrator George Guidall is such an amazing talent. His style with this book is different from many of the other books I have listened to recently, instead of acting out the story it feels more like having someone reading a bedtime story. It has taken some adjusting, but I like it well enough.

I look forward to listening to more Mitch Rapp novels.

From the publisher:

Before he was considered a CIA superagent, before he was thought of as a terrorist’s worst nightmare, and before he was both loathed and admired by the politicians on Capitol Hill, Mitch Rapp was a gifted college athlete without a care in the world… and then tragedy struck.

Two decades of cutthroat, partisan politics has left the CIA and the country in an increasingly vulnerable position. Cold War veteran and CIA Operations Director Thomas Stansfield knows he must prepare his people for the next war. The rise of Islamic terrorism is coming, and it needs to be met abroad before it reaches America’s shores. Stansfield directs his protégé, Irene Kennedy, and his old Cold War colleague, Stan Hurley, to form a new group of clandestine operatives who will work outside the normal chain of commandmen who do not exist.

What type of man is willing to kill for his country without putting on a uniform? Kennedy finds him in the wake of the Pan Am Lockerbie terrorist attack. Two-hundred and seventy souls perished that cold December night, and thousands of family and friends were left searching for comfort. Mitch Rapp was one of them, but he was not interested in comfort. He wanted retribution.

Six months of intense training has prepared him to bring the war to the enemy’s doorstep, and he does so with brutal efficiency. Rapp starts in Istanbul, where he assassinates the Turkish arms dealer who sold the explosives used in the Pan Am attack. Rapp then moves onto Hamburg with his team and across Europe, leaving a trail of bodies. All roads lead to Beirut, though, and what Rapp doesnt know is that the enemy is aware of his existence and has prepared a trap. The hunter is about to become the hunted, and Rapp will need every ounce of skill and cunning if he is to survive the war-ravaged city and its various terrorist factions.

©2010 Vince Flynn (P)2010 Simon and Schuster Audio

I rate American Assassin a 7 out of 10 and recommend it to anyone looking for a spy adventure.