Author Spotlight: Peter Clines

peter clines audiobook 14

According to his Amazon.com biography, Peter Clines wrote his first novel, Lizard Men From The Center of The Earth, at the age of eight. Clines’ overactive imagination stems from comic books and Star Wars. He has proven himself to be a writer of wit, style, and originality. The following four titles are well worth checking out for their sheer inventiveness alone. Clines offers a unique take on end of the world sagas which is beyond refreshing.  All the titles listed below are available in audiobook format from Audible.com and are truly brought to life by some great narrators!

Clines’ new release, 14, features a down on his luck bachelor whose apartment complex may contain more than meets the eye; with answers that may mean the end of everything. The audiobook is narrated by Ray Porter whose direct, journalistic approach to narration harkens back to the days of radio news flash bulletins. Audible customer ratings are strong for this audiobook, with an average rating of four out of five stars.

Two more audiobooks from Clines include Ex-Heroes: Book 1 and Ex-Patriots: Book 2In the first book of the series, Ex-Heroes establishes characters and situations following a global outbreak of zombies which has left the world in ruins.  The second book, Ex-Patriots, follows a band of heroes who face challenges and attrition two years after the end of the world.  Help eventually comes from a US Army battalion of super-soldiers; only this battalion was built prior to the outbreak leaving many questions to be answered.  Both audiobooks are narrated by the same two-person ensemble of Jay Snyder and Khistine Hvam which worked well to distinguish the female and male characters throughout the books.

Another audiobook from Clines, The Junkie Quatrain continues Clines’ unique spin on end of the world sagas.  The Junkie Quatrain consists of four tales of survival, in addition to four tales regarding the post-apocalypse. Christian Rummel lends his voice, along with Therese Plummer, and their work is top-notch.

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Now you can join Audible.com for Just $7.49 and receive a credit good toward any of the audiobooks mentioned in this article or another audiobook of your choice. This introductory rate of $7.49/month is available for the first three months of your membership and then you can choose to continue at $14.95 per month.  In addition, your subscription includes the following member benefits:

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Another Free Audiobook

We just updated our Free Audiobook Roundup page. Hop on over there now and get to downloading! We don’t know how long these will last.

New today is an audiobook from Nora Roberts called The Next Always

As always, if you stumble upon an offer we have listed that is no longer valid then please let us know so we can keep that page up to date.

Thanks!

Free Audiobook Roundup

Note: This page has become so popular we have decided to make it a permanent fixture on our website. View the current version with new free audiobooks at the following page: 

Free Audiobook Roundup

 

 

We love free audiobooks! I’m sure you do too. We have found several audiobooks currently offered for free on audible.com, christianaudio.com and occasionally a few other sites.

Download them while you can! We don’t know how long these offers will last.

See the full list below.

 

 

 Free Audiobooks

 

If you find that any of these offers have expired please let us know in the comments and we will remove them from the list.

 

 

 

Top 10 Halloween Audiobooks

I love to have a few good scares around Halloween, but honestly it doesn’t take much! Usually my masked husband sneaks himself into my dark office while I’m working and scares me half to death. He’s sweet like that!

John and I would like to suggest some audiobooks (in no particular order) that will keep you on your toes. We’ve tried to toss in something for everyone and help make your Halloween extra spooky!

Listen at your own risk!

1. Psycho

Author: Robert Bloch

Narrator: Paul Michael Garcia

Publisher: Blackstone Audiobooks

Publisher’s Summary: It was a dark and stormy night when Mary Crane glimpsed the unlit neon sign announcing the vacancy at the Bates Motel. Exhausted, lost, and at the end of her rope, she was eager for a hot shower and a bed for the night. Her room was musty, but clean, and the manager seemed nice, if a little odd.

This classic horror novel, which inspired the famous film by Alfred Hitchcock, has been thrilling people for 50 years. It introduced one of the most unexpectedly-twisted villains of all time in Norman Bates, the reserved motel manager with a mother complex, and has been called the “first psychoanalytic thriller.”

©1959 Robert Bloch; (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Download Psycho now!

 

2. Patient Zero

Author: Jonathan Maberry

Narrator: Ray Parker

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Publisher’s Summary: From multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning author Jonathan Maberry comes a major new thriller that combines the best of the New York Times best-selling books World War Z by Max Brooks and James Rollins’ Sigma Force Series to kick off the start of a new series featuring Joe Ledger and the Department of Military Sciences.When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there’s either something wrong with your world or something wrong with your skills – and there’s nothing wrong with Joe Ledger’s skills. And that’s both a good and a bad thing. It’s good because he’s a Baltimore detective who has just been secretly recruited by the government to lead a new task force created to deal with the problems that Homeland Security can’t handle. This rapid-response group is called the Department of Military Sciences, or the DMS for short. It’s bad because his first mission is to help stop a group of terrorists from releasing a dreadful bioweapon that can turn ordinary people into zombies. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.

Jonathan Maberry is the New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award–winning author of Ghost Road Blues, the first of a trilogy of thrillers with a supernatural bite. A professional writer and writing teacher, he has sold more than 1.000 articles, 17 nonfiction books, six novels, and two plays.

©2009 Jonathan Maberry (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Download Patient Zero now!

 

audiobook reviews the cold kiss audiobook review3. The Cold Kiss

Author: John Rector

Narrated by: Paul Michael Garcia

Published by: Blackstone Audio

Publisher’s Summary: All Nate and Sara want is a new life in a new town, away from the crime and poverty of their past. So when they are approached at a roadside diner by a shady hitchhiker offering $500 for a ride to Omaha, they wonder if their luck might be changing. At first it seems like so much easy money—but within a few hours the man is dead.

Now, forced off the road by a blizzard and trapped in a run-down motel on the side of a deserted highway, Nate and Sara begin to uncover the man’s secrets: who he was, how he died, and most importantly, why he was carrying two million dollars in his suitcase. Before they know it, Nate and Sara are fighting for their lives. In the end, each has to decide just how far they are willing to go to survive.

The Cold Kiss is an everyman psychological thriller that pits a young couple against moral corruption, greed, betrayal, and love. For two characters who may have used up all their chances, it’s the classic final trip down the dark tunnel that might lead to heaven, but drags them through hell.

©2010 John Rector (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Download The Cold Kiss now!

 

4. IT

Author: Stephen King

Narrator: Steven Weber

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Publisher’s Summary: It’s a place as hauntingly familiar as your own hometown. Only in Derry, the haunting is real.

In 1958, the small town of Derry, Maine is shaken by a series of brutal murders targeting children. That fateful summer, seven kids are drawn together in a fierce bond of friendship to face a force of unspeakable evil. Twenty-seven years later, when the murder cycle begins again, they are summoned back to their hometown, reunited for a final, decisive battle against the reawakened evil.

Winner of the British Fantasy Award and the bestselling book in America when it was published in 1986, It is Stephen King’s incomparable epic about evil in all its forms and that which it cannot destroy.

Download IT now!

 

5. Those Across The River

Author: Christopher Buehlman

Narrated by: Mark Bramhall

Published by: Penguin Audio

Publisher’s Summary:  Failed academic Frank Nichols and his wife, Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family’s old estate – the Savoyard Plantation – and the horrors that occurred there. At first, the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice. It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard still stand. Where a longstanding debt of blood has never been forgotten. A debt that has been waiting patiently for Frank Nichols’s homecoming…

©2011 Christopher Buehlman (P)2011 Penguin

Download Those Across The River now!

 

6. The Ridge

Author: Michael Koryta

Narrated by: Robert Petkoff

Published by: Hachette Audio

Publisher’s Summary: In an isolated stretch of eastern Kentucky, on a hilltop known as Blade Ridge, stands a lighthouse that illuminates nothing but the surrounding woods. For years the lighthouse has been considered no more than an eccentric local landmark – until its builder is found dead at the top of the light, and his belongings reveal a troubling local history.

For deputy sheriff Kevin Kimble, the lighthouse-keeper’s death is disturbing and personal. Years ago, Kimble was shot while on duty. Somehow the death suggests a connection between the lighthouse and the most terrifying moment of his life.

Audrey Clark is in the midst of moving her large-cat sanctuary onto land adjacent to the lighthouse. Sixty-seven tigers, lions, leopards, and one legendary black panther are about to have a new home there. Her husband, the sanctuary’s founder, died scouting the new property, and Audrey is determined to see his vision through.

As strange occurrences multiply at the Ridge, the animals grow ever more restless, and Kimble and Audrey try to understand what evil forces are moving through this ancient landscape, just past the divide between dark and light.

The Ridge is the new thriller from international best seller Michael Koryta, further evidence of why Dean Koontz has said “Michael Koryta’s work resonates into deeper strata than does most of what I read” and why Michael Connelly has named him “one of the best of the best.”

©2011 Michael Koryta (P)2011 Hachette

Download The Ridge now!

 

7. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War

Author: Max Brooks

Narrated by: Alan Alda, John Turturro, Rob Reiner, etc

Published by: Random House Audio

Publisher’s Summary: The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of 30 million souls, to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet.

He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years.

Ranging from the now infamous village of New Dachang in the United Federation of China, where the epidemiological trail began with the 12-year-old Patient Zero, to the unnamed northern forests where untold numbers sought a terrible and temporary refuge in the cold, to the United States of Southern Africa, where the Redeker Plan provided hope for humanity at an unspeakable price, to the west-of-the-Rockies redoubt where the North American tide finally started to turn, this invaluable chronicle reflects the full scope and duration of the Zombie War.

Note: Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission.

©2006 Max Brooks; (P)2006 Random House, Inc.

Download World War Z now!

 

8. The Night Strangers

Author: Chris Bohjalian

Narrated by: Alison Fraser, Mark Bramhall

Published by: Random House Audio

Publisher’s Summary: From the bestselling author of The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and Secrets of Eden, comes a riveting and dramatic ghost story.

In a dusty corner of a basement in a rambling Victorian house in northern New Hampshire, a door has long been sealed shut with 39 six-inch-long carriage bolts.

The home’s new owners are Chip and Emily Linton and their twin ten-year-old daughters. Together they hope to rebuild their lives there after Chip, an airline pilot, has to ditch his 70-seat regional jet in Lake Champlain after double engine failure. Unlike the Miracle on the Hudson, however, most of the passengers aboard Flight 1611 die on impact or drown. The body count? Thirty-nine – a coincidence not lost on Chip when he discovers the number of bolts in that basement door. Meanwhile, Emily finds herself wondering about the women in this sparsely populated White Mountain village – self-proclaimed herbalists – and their interest in her fifth-grade daughters. Are the women mad? Or is it her husband, in the wake of the tragedy, whose grip on sanity has become desperately tenuous?

The result is a poignant and powerful ghost story with all the hallmarks readers have come to expect from bestselling novelist Chris Bohjalian: a palpable sense of place, an unerring sense of the demons that drive us, and characters we care about deeply.

The difference this time? Some of those characters are dead.

©2011 Chris Bohjalian (P)2011 Random House Audio

Download The Night Strangers Now!

 

9. The Reapers Are The Angels

Author: Alden Bell

Narrated by: Tai Sammons

Published by: Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Publisher’s Summary:  For 25 years, civilization has survived in meager enclaves, guarded against a plague of the dead. Temple wanders this blighted landscape, keeping to herself and keeping her demons inside her heart. She can’t remember a time before the zombies, but she does remember an old man who took her in and the younger brother she cared for until the tragedy that set her off on her personal journey toward redemption. Moving back and forth between the insulted remnants of society and the brutal frontier beyond, Temple must decide where ultimately to make a home and find the salvation she seeks.

©2010 Alden Bell (P)2010 Blackstone Audio

Download The Reapers Are The Angels Now 

 

10. Ashes, Ashes

Author: Jo Treggiari

Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell

Published by: Oasis Audio

Publisher’s Summary:  The world has ended… What comes next? Smallpox epidemics, floods, droughts—for 16-year old Lucy, the end of the world came and went, stealing with it everyone she ever loved. Even the landscape of her beloved New York City is ever-shifting and full of hidden dangers. As the weather rages out of control, she survives alone in the wilds of Central Park, hunting and foraging for food and making do with the little she has, while avoiding roving scavengers and thieves. But when an unrelenting pack of vicious hounds begins to hunt her, Lucy is not sure she can continue on her own. Then, suddenly, she is swept to safety by a mysterious boy named Aidan, who helps her escape the hounds and urgers her to join a band of survivors. Reluctantly, she finds him after her home is destroyed; however, new dangers await her. An army of Sweepers terrorizes the camp, carting off innocent people and infecting them with the plague. Lucy and Aidan realize that it’s up to them to save their friends, but Lucy doesn’t know that the Sweepers have laid a trap—for her. There is something special about Lucy, and the Sweepers will stop at nothing to have her in their clutches. Jo Treggiari spins a thrilling tale of adventure, romance, and one girl’s unyielding courage through the darkest of nightmares.

©2011 Jo Treggiari (P)2011 Oasis

Download Ashes, Ashes now!

Hot Audiobooks for September 2011

Every month we are eagerly anticipating the release of certain audiobook titles.. below you will find ten of the most intriguing audiobooks that will be released in September. Please let us know what audiobooks you are looking forward to in the comments.

 1. What It Is Like To Go To War

Author: Karl Marlantes

Narrator: Bronson Pinchot

Length: 8 hrs 47 min

Release Date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)

Publisher’s Summary:  From the author of the bestselling and award-winning Matterhorn comes a brilliant nonfiction book about war and the psychological and spiritual toll it takes on those who fight.

“I wrote this book primarily to come to terms with my own experience of combat. So far—reading, writing, thinking—that has taken over thirty years.”

In 1969, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of a platoon of forty marines who would live or die by his decisions. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his war experience. In his first work of nonfiction, Marlantes takes a deeply personal and candid look at what it is like to experience the ordeal of combat, critically examining how we might better prepare our soldiers for war.

Just as Matterhorn is already acclaimed a classic of war literature, What It Is Like to Go to War is set to become required reading for anyone—soldier or civilian—interested in this visceral and all too essential part of the human experience.

Purchasing Options: Direct from Blackstone Audio | Via Audible.com

2. Sanctus

Author: Simon Toyne

Narrator: Simon Vance

Length: 11 hrs 57 min

Release Date: September 6, 2011

Publisher: Harper Audio

(See More New Releases from Harper Audio)

Publisher’s Summary: One man’s sacrifice shocks the world….

One woman’s courage threatens a conspiracy as old as humankind.

And some will do anything—anything—to keep their secrets in the dark.

A man climbs a cliff face in the oldest inhabited place on earth, a mountain known as the Citadel, a Vatican-like city-state that towers above the city of Ruin in modern-day Turkey. But this is no ordinary ascent. It is a dangerous, symbolic act. And thanks to the media, it is an event witnessed by the entire world.

Few people understand its consequence. But for foundation worker Kathryn Mann and a handful of others, it’s evidence that a revolution is at hand. For the Sancti, the cowled and secretive monks who live inside the Citadel, it could mean the end of everything they have built. They will stop at nothing to keep what is theirs, and they will break every law in every country and even kill to hold it fast. For American reporter Liv Adamsen, it spurs the memory of the beloved brother she lost years before, setting her on a journey across the world and into the heart of her own identity.

There, she will make a discovery so shocking that it will change everything.

©2011 Simon Toyne (P)2011 HarperCollinsPublishers

Purchasing Options: Via Audible.com

 

3. Vacation

Author: Matthew Costello

Narrator: Peter Macon

Length: 6 hrs 50 min

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Release Date: September 27, 2011

(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)

Publisher’s Summary: Jack Murphy and his family need a vacation. This one might just kill them.

After a global crisis causes crops to fail and species to disappear, something even more deadly happens. Masses around the world suddenly became predators, feeding off their own kind. These “Can Heads” grow to such a threat that fences, gated compounds, and SWAT-style police protection become absolutely necessary to live.

After one attack leaves NYPD cop Jack Murphy wounded and his partner dead, Jack takes his wife and kids on a vacation far up north, to the Paterville Family Camp, a fortress-like compound in the mountains where families can still swim and take boats out on a lake.

At first, it’s idyllic. There’s plenty of food, fun stuff for their children, and another nice young couple with kids of their own. And when the camp suffers a Can Head attack, Jack even helps defend it. He’s immediately offered a job in security. His family wants to stay.

But Jack slowly comes to realize that there’s something else going on at Paterville Family Camp, and when he makes a gruesome discovery, he will be forced to get his family out, no matter who—or what—stands in his way.

Purchasing Options: Direct from Blackstone Audio

 

4. A Crack In Everything - The Susan Callisto Mysteries, Book 1

Author: Angela Gerst

Narrator: Xe Sands

(follow Xe Sands on twitter! She is super nice!)

Length: 8 hrs

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Release Date: September 6, 2011

(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)

Publisher’s Summary: Susan Callisto is pushing thirty and taking stock. The man in her life, Massachusetts Police Lieutenant Michael Benedict, has unaccountably left her without a word of goodbye. Wounded but full of pride, Susan at first wonders why and then shrugs and decides to forget about him. Who needs a moody piece of work like Michael, anyway? Certainly not Susan who, transitioning from lawyer to political consultant, is far too busy to think about love—except on lonely summer nights.

Her consulting firm caters to entry-level candidates, and late in the season, political novice Charles Renfrow begs Susan to help him run for mayor of Telford. But Renfrow is a scientist, not a politician, and his pockets are far too deep. Susan is tempted—Renfrow knows how to seduce—but her suspicions, if not her libido, are aroused. When a friend insists that Renfrow’s biotech company is dumping deadly toxic waste, Susan decides to find out the truth before committing herself.

Instead of the truth, she finds a corpse, Renfrow’s gorgeous assistant, Torie Moran. The murder weapon is a microtome blade, razor sharp and accessible to anyone at Renfrow’s lab. After Torie’s murder, violence shadows Susan and people close to her. She is attacked in her driveway. An elderly client is beaten and left for dead. The young daughter of a client is abducted on her way to camp. All are the sticky strands of a web with her name on it, Susan fears. Then Renfrow himself turns up dead. Could he have been the master of all of this?

The murders bring Michael Benedict back into Susan’s life, and when another of her clients is charged, she elbows her way into Michael’s investigation. Working on parallel tracks, Michael explores mountains while Susan unearths a truth about little Delia Baird. In the nick of time, Susan rescues Delia from the person she now reckons has killed Renfrow and his assistant. But she’s only half right. Susan must confront the real killer—and try to escape with her life.

 

5. Lethal

Author: Sandra Brown

Narrator: Victor Slezak

Publisher: Hachette Audio

Release Date: September 27, 2011

(See More New Releases from Hachette Audio)

Publisher’s Summary: When her four year old daughter informs her a sick man is in their yard, Honor Gillette rushes out to help him. But that “sick” man turns out to be Lee Coburn, the man accused of murdering seven people the night before. Dangerous, desperate, and armed, he promises Honor that she and her daughter won’t be hurt as long as she does everything he asks. She has no choice but to accept him at his word.

But Honor soon discovers that even those close to her can’t be trusted. Coburn claims that her beloved late husband possessed something extremely valuable that places Honor and her daughter in grave danger. Coburn is there to retrieve it — at any cost. From FBI offices in Washington, D.C., to a rundown shrimp boat in coastal Louisiana, Coburn and Honor run for their lives from the very people sworn to protect them, and unravel a web of corruption and depravity that threatens not only them, but the fabric of our society

 

6. Those Across The River

Author: Christopher Buehlman

Narrator: Mark Bramhall

Length: 9 hrs and 5 min

Publisher: Penguin Audio

(See More New Releases from Penguin Audio)

Release Date: September 27, 2011

Publisher’s Summary: Failed academic Frank Nichols and his “wife,” Eudora, have arrived in the sleepy Georgia town of Whitbrow, where Frank hopes to write a history of his family’s old estate, the Savoyard Plantation, and the horrors that occurred there. An aunt Frank never knew bequeathed him a modest homestead, so he and Eudora take the opportunity to break ties with the past. But in a letter delivered after her death, his aunt warned Frank not to live in the house—a warning Frank ignores.

At first the quaint, rural ways of their new neighbors seem to be everything they wanted. But there is an unspoken dread that the townsfolk have lived with for generations. A presence that demands sacrifice.

It comes from the shadowy woods across the river, where the ruins of Savoyard still stand, where a longstanding debt of blood has never been forgotten—a debt that has been waiting patiently for Frank Nichols’ homecoming.

As tensions mount, listeners will find themselves on the edge of their seats anticipating the spine-tingling conclusion to this stunning novel.

Buehlman is the most original voice in horror since Stephen King.

 

7. Reamde

Author: Neal Stephenson

Narrator: Malcolm Hillgartner

Length: 43 hrs

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

(See More New Releases from Brilliance Audio)

Release Date: September 20, 2011

Publisher’s Summary: In 1972, Richard Forthrast, the black sheep of an Iowa farming clan, fled to the mountains of British Columbia to avoid the draft. A skilled hunting guide, he eventually amassed a fortune by smuggling marijuana across the border between Canada and Idaho. As the years passed, Richard went straight and returned to the States after the U.S. government granted amnesty to draft dodgers. He parlayed his wealth into an empire and developed a remote resort in which he lives. He also created T’Rain, a multibillion-dollar, massively multiplayer online role-playing game with millions of fans around the world. But T’Rain’s success has also made it a target. Hackers have struck gold by unleashing REAMDE, a virus that encrypts all of a player’s electronic files and holds them for ransom. They have also unwittingly triggered a deadly war beyond the boundaries of the game’s virtual universe — and Richard is at ground zero.

Racing around the globe from the Pacific Northwest to China to the wilds of northern Idaho and points in between, Reamde is a swift-paced thriller that traverses worlds virtual and real. Filled with unexpected twists and turns in which unforgettable villains and unlikely heroes face off in a battle for survival, it is a brilliant refraction of the twenty-first century, from the global war on terror to social media, computer hackers to mobsters, entrepreneurs to religious fundamentalists. Above all, Reamde is an enthralling human story — an entertaining and epic page-turner from the extraordinary Neal Stephenson.

 

8. The Wounded Heart - The Amish Quilt Trilogy, Book 1

Author: Adina Senft

Narrator: Marguerite Gavin

Length: 8 hrs

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Release Date: September 27, 2011

(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)

Publisher’s Summary: When a business offer turns into something more personal, Amelia is torn between what logic tells her is right and the desire of her heart.

A widow with two small children, Amelia Beiler is struggling to make ends meet. She is running her late husband’s business, but it’s not what she was raised to do, which is run a home. When she gets an offer for the business from Eli Fischer, she’s only too relieved to consider it—especially when it looks like Eli’s interest might include more than just the shop. But when she begins to experience strange physical symptoms and is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, it’s difficult not to question God’s will. If she pursues the treatment she believes in, she risks going under the bann. But how can she allow Eli to court her when she can’t promise him a future?

Includes instructions to make the quilt block featured in the novel

 

9. Adventures of the Karaoke King

Author: Harold Taw

Narrator: James Chen

Publisher: Brilliance Audio

(See More New Releases from Brilliance Audio)

Release Date: September 12, 2011

Publisher’s Summary: What happens when a thirty-something, newly divorced man discovers courage and adventure, thanks to a karaoke contest? In Adventures of the Karaoke King, Harold Taw introduces us to Guy Watanabe, a man marginally aware of his Asian background and decidedly unaware of how poorly he has planned for his future. In this riotous, often thoughtful, and always entertaining novel, readers are taken on a memorable journey that crosses America, Asia, and back, with the last leg spent in a shipping container.

As we follow Guy on his odyssey, we meet a former Thai prostitute and her fiancé, who orchestrates a beating to the overly attentive Watanabe and steals his cherished karaoke medal. We get to know a closeted gay man, a heavily-armed dwarf, and a Chinese businessman so determined to become the king of a worldwide karaoke empire that nothing — and no one — will block his path. Provocative, taunting, and dependably wayward, Watanabe has lessons to learn about understanding who he is, and readers may learn a few along the way.

 

 10. We The Animals

Author: Justin Torres

Narrator: Frankie J. Alvarez

Publisher: Blackstone Audio

Length: 3 hrs 5 min

Release Date: September 1, 2011

(See More New Releases from Blackstone Audio)

Publisher’s Summary: An exquisite, blistering debut novel

Three brothers tear their way through childhood—smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn—he’s Puerto Rican, she’s white—and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmakes a family many times.

Life in this family is fierce and absorbing, full of chaos and heartbreak and the euphoria of belonging completely to one another. From the intense familial unity felt by a child to the profound alienation he endures as he begins to see the world, this beautiful novel reinvents the coming-of-age story in a way that is sly and punch-in-the-stomach powerful.

Written in magical language with unforgettable images, this is a stunning exploration of the viscerally charged landscape of growing up, how deeply we are formed by our earliest bonds, and how we are ultimately propelled at escape velocity toward our futures.

Purchasing Options: Direct from Blackstone Audio | Via Audible.com

Audiobook of the Week – A Stolen Life by Jaycee Dugard

A Stolen Life: A Memoir

Author: Jaycee Dugard

Narrator: Jaycee Dugard

Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

Release Date: 7/12/2011

Check out my full review!

Listening to this audiobook was an amazing experience. If you watched the special Jaycee did on television just before her book was released, you saw a beautiful, intelligent young woman who survived 18 years of being held captive. She was raped, abused and hidden inside the backyard of the Garridos, her kidnappers.

This audiobook takes us inside the fence, inside her simple tent where she grew up and raised two children. Dugard writes about how she misses her Mom and wonders if she still misses her too. Had she given up hope? Did she still love her?

I can’t say enough wonderful things about this audiobook. Dugard is an amazing young woman with a long, happy life ahead of her. After being reunited with her family, she’s once again thriving.

Publisher’s Summary: “In the summer of 1991 I was a normal kid. I did normal things. I had friends and a mother who loved me. I was just like you. Until the day my life was stolen. For eighteen years I was a prisoner. I was an object for someone to use and abuse. For eighteen years I was not allowed to speak my own name. I became a mother and was forced to be a sister. For eighteen years I survived an impossible situation. On August 26, 2009, I took my name back. My name is Jaycee Lee Dugard. I dont think of myself as a victim. I survived. A Stolen Life is my story in my own words, in my own way, exactly as I remember it.”

©2011 Jaycee Dugard (P)2011 Simon & Schuster Audio

Disclosure: I purchased this audiobook from Audible.com

Download A Stolen Life: A Memoir now!

Audiobook of the Week – Bossypants by Tina Fey

Read Maggie’s Review

Author: Tina Fey
Narrator: Tina Fey
Length: 5 hrs 35 min
Publisher: Hachette Audio

Maggie’s recent review of this audiobook convinced me to give Bossypants a try. It didn’t take hardly any time at all for me to fall in love with Tina’s story and her narration.

Extremely funny stuff.. I found that the entire time I was listening to this book I had a stupid grin pasted on my face. I would also make a point to memorize sections so that I could share the laugh with my wife later.

Not many books make me want to immediately reread (or relisten) to them again but Bossypants did exactly that. I’m already 3/4 of the way through my second listen and still having a great time!

Bossypants made for a very refreshing and entertaining change of pace! Highly recommended!

 

Publisher’s Summary: Before Liz Lemon, before “Weekend Update”, before “Sarah Palin”, Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.

She has seen both of those dreams come true.

At last, Tina Fey’s story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon – from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.

Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we’ve all suspected: you’re no one until someone calls you bossy.

Includes special, never-before-solicited opinions on breastfeeding, princesses, Photoshop, the electoral process, and Italian rum cake!

©2011 Tina Fey (P)2011 Hachette Audio

 

 

Audiobook of the Week – First Grave on the Right

First Grave on the Right

Author: Darynda Jones

Narrator: Lorelei King

Length: 9 hrs and 4 mins

Publisher: MacMillan Audio

Release Date: 2/1/2011

If you like Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series, you’ll love Darynda Jones and her Charley Davidson series.

First Grave on the Right was released in February to rave reviews of Charley’s new, but growing fan base. Charley Davidson is a grim reaper, but don’t be fooled into thinking she’s the normal scythe toting, black cape wearing scary man. She’s sassy, sexy and hilarious. Read my full review here!

Charley is a private investigator by trade, but spends a lot of time helping ghostly acquaintances cross over. Usually those acquaintances need her help in solving the mystery behind their death or passing on messages to their loved ones.

Darynda Jones is a wonderful new author and I’d recommend all those Stephanie Plum lovers to jump on this wagon! I do compare Charley’s character to Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum a lot, but they’re very different. Stephanie doesn’t deal with the DEAD… and lingering.

Jones’ second release, Second Grave on the Left was recently released, so you can jump into that audiobook next.

It’s a great series and you’ll love Lorelei King’s narration.

Publisher’s Summary: A smashing, award-winning debut novel that introduces Charley Davidson: part-time private investigator and full-time Grim Reaper Charley sees dead people. That’s right, she sees dead people. And it’s her job to convince them to “go into the light.” But when these very dead people have died under less than ideal circumstances (i.e. murder), sometimes they want Charley to bring the bad guys to justice. Complicating matters are the intensely hot dreams she’s been having about an Entity who has been following her all her life…and it turns out he might not be dead after all. In fact, he might be something else entirely. This is a thrilling debut novel from an exciting newcomer to the world of paranormal romantic suspense. Audio includes a sneak peak of Second Grave on the Left.

©2010 Darynda Jones (P)2010 Macmillan Audio

Disclosure: I purchased this audiobook from Audible.com

Download First Grave on the Right here!

Download Second Grave on the Left here!

Audiobooks of the Week – Daemon & Freedom by Daniel Suarez

This week’s Audiobook Recommendation is a pair of fast paced techno-thrillers from Daniel Suarez.

My Rating: ★★★★☆

Read My Review Here

Author: Daniel Suarez

Narrator: Jeff Gurner

Length: 15 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks

Publisher’s Summary: Technology controls almost everything in our modern-day world, from remote entry on our cars to access to our homes, from the flight controls of our airplanes to the movements of the entire world economy. Thousands of autonomous computer programs, or daemons, make our networked world possible, running constantly in the background of our lives, trafficking e-mail, transferring money, and monitoring power grids. For the most part, daemons are benign, but the same can’t always be said for the people who design them.

Matthew Sobol was a legendary computer game designer – the architect behind half-a-dozen popular online games. His premature death depressed both gamers and his company’s stock price. But Sobol’s fans aren’t the only ones to note his passing. When his obituary is posted online, a previously dormant daemon activates, initiating a chain of events intended to unravel the fabric of our hyper-efficient, interconnected world. With Sobol’s secrets buried along with him, and as new layers of his daemon are unleashed at every turn, it’s up to an unlikely alliance to decipher his intricate plans and wrest the world from the grasp of a nameless, faceless enemy – or learn to live in a society in which we are no longer in control. . . .

Computer technology expert Daniel Suarez blends haunting high-tech realism with gripping suspense in an authentic, complex thriller in the tradition of Michael Crichton, Neal Stephenson, and William Gibson.

©2009 Daniel Suarez; (P)2009 Penguin Audio

Get your copy here: Daemon by Daniel Suarez

 

My Rating: ★★★★☆

Read My Review Here

Author: Daniel Suarez

Narrator: Jeff Gurner

Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins

Publisher: Penguin Audiobooks

Publisher’s Summary: Here is the propulsive, shockingly plausible sequel to New York Times best seller Daemon.

In one of the most buzzed-about debuts of 2009, Daniel Suarez introduced a terrifying vision of a new world order, controlled by the Daemon, an insidious computer program unleashed by a hi-tech wunderkind, Daemon captured the attention of the tech community, became a New York Times and Indie best seller, and left readers hungry for more. Well, more is here, and it’s even more gripping than its predecessor.

In the opening chapters of Freedom, the Daemon is firmly in control, using an expanded network of real-world, dispossessed darknet operatives to tear apart civilization and rebuild it anew. Soon civil war breaks out in the American Midwest, in a brutal wave of violence that becomes known as the Corn Rebellion. Former detective Pete Sebeck, now the Daemon’s most powerful – though reluctant – operative, must lead a small band of enlightened humans toward a populist movement designed to protect the new world order. But the private armies of global business are preparing to crush the Daemon once and for all.

In a world of conflicted loyalties, rapidly diminishing human power, and the possibility that anyone can be a spy, what’s at stake is nothing less than human freedom’s last hope to survive the technology revolution.

©2010 Penguin; ©2010 Daniel Suarez

 

Get your copy here: Freedom by Daniel Suarez

Recommendation of the Week

The Memory of Running

Author: Ron McLarty

Narrator: Ron McLarty

Length: 13 hrs and 10 min

Publisher: Recorded Books

Release Date: 1/16/04

The Memory of Running has been on my TBL pile since I came across Stephen King’s glowing recommendation on EW.com. (The best book you can’t read. No, ”The Memory of Running” isn’t in print, but you can still hear it.)

I would always think about this book when I was looking for my next listen but I kept passing it by for some new sci fi or fantasy novel. Perhaps I just had to be in the right mindset before I could really appreciate this book.

I finally used up an Audible credit for this book almost a year ago and it just there in my library until last week. I had finally used up my last audible credit and I needed something to listen to.. Upon browsing through my audible library I found this title and loaded it on my iPhone.

The character of Smithson Ide struck a chord with me almost immediately. The journey he embarks on is at times tragic, emotionally draining, horrifying and funny. All of these elements when combined with McLarty’s excellent narration resulted in an incredible listening experience that should not be missed.

If you haven’t already.. give this audiobook a chance!

Publisher’s Summary: Award-winning actor and playwright Ron McLarty is well known for his audiobook performances. What fewer people realize is that he’s also an accomplished author. In this wonderfully quirky novel, available exclusively as an audiobook, McLarty takes readers on a quest to find hope and redemption with an unlikely hero.

Smithson Ide is 43 years old and weighs 279 pounds when his parents die in an accident. Lost in memories of childhood, Smithson uncovers his old Raleigh bicycle in the garage and begins a cross-country journey to find his beautiful, but tragically psychotic sister. Keenly aware of how ridiculous he must appear, Smithson nonetheless perseveres through a journey that is hilarious and horrifying. It is a trip, he soon realizes, that might provide his last chance to become the person he has always wanted to be.

In late 2003, in his column in Entertainment Weekly, Stephen King called The Memory of Running ”the best novel you won’t read this year.” This glowing endorsement of the audiobook resulted in Ron McLarty receiving a $2 million two-book deal from Viking Penguin. Also, Warner Brothers has shelled out big bucks for the movie rights to The Memory of Running, for which McLarty will write the script.

©2002 Ron McLarty; (P)2002 Recorded Books, LLC

Disclosure: I purchased this audiobook from Audible.com

If you would like to listen to The Memory of Running you can purchase it from one of the following locations: Audible  or Recorded Books

 



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