DWD's Reviews

  Published in 2017 by Blackstone Audio, Inc. Read by Bronson Pinchot Duration: 8 hours, 28 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: A Colorado police chief named Colton has organized a search for a young girl he suspects has been abducted. He reaches out to the best tracker he knows, Sam "Raven" Spears, for help. Raven is part Sioux and part Cherokee - an important fact because he soon suspects that the abductor is acting out a Cherokee legend featuring cannibals.  While Colton and Raven are on the hunt, there is a North Korean EMP attack on the United States. For those not aware, EMP stands for Electromagnetic Pulse. Nuclear weapons emit a pulse that absolutely fries most electronics. If you bomb a city normally, the pulse is limited by hills, buildings, and lots of other things. But, if you blow a nuclear bomb up high up in the air, the bomb doesn't do a lot of damage but the EMP kills all exposed modern cars (older cars have no computer systems, electrical systems, power plants...

  Published in 2018 by Penguin Audio. Read by Stephen Mendel Duration: 10 hours, 44 minutes. Unabridged Synopsis: The third entry in the Peter Ash series begins with Peter Ash working on a team rebuilding hiking trails in Oregon and writing long heartfelt letters back to his love interest from the second book. He makes friends with an older man named Henry (a Vietnam vet, as opposed to Ash being a vet of Iran and Afghanistan.) Henry gets a call from his daughter in Colorado and asks for Henry's help with her business that provides security for some of the legal marijuana businesses. Turns out that these businesses have to operate completely in cash because marijuana is still illegal so far as the federal government is concerned so banks cannot take credit cards, debit cards or even deposits because it would be considered helping to traffic drugs. This means that there are shipments of pot and shipments of cash coming and going and that can attract bad guys. An entire security crew ...

  Published in 2022 by Recorded Books. Read by David Chandler. Duration: 9 hours, 4 minutes. Unabridged. Synopsis: Game Warden Joe Pickett investigates a report of a dead elk. Fearing that it is the victim of a botched attempt at poaching, he investigates. Instead, he finds a burned corpse and falls headlong into another murder investigation. Meanwhile, Joe's wife Marybeth, the director of the local library discovers an odd package left at the library with connections to a prominent Nazi from World War II. And...Nate Romanowski is in Denver hunting down an old enemy during the midst of an Antifa/BLM riot. My review: This is a book series about a game warden. Oftentimes, he is joined by a former special forces guy who is so into nature that he used to stand naked in a stream of water for hours at a time to get the feel of a river and its entire ecosystem - from the slime at the bottom to the fish to the birds that swoop down to the beavers that dam it up. Antifa protest in Denver Th...

  Published by Random House Audio in 2008. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 14 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. I think that I have worked my way through all of the Jack Reacher novels and short stories over the last 5 years. Nothing to Lose is the last one (I think). I read them all out of order, but fans know that that is okay since they were never written in order in the first place. Sadly, this was one of the weakest of the entire very large collection.  Reacher is travelling from Maine to San Diego just to see the country. He notes that Colorado has two towns with interesting names very close to one another: Hope and Despair. The author, Lee Child. Hope is a pleasant enough place with a hardware store and a hotel and diner. Reacher decides to hike to nearby despair and is immediately arrested for being a vagrant. Technically, he is a vagrant. He has no job, no fixed address and no plans to acquire either.  Despair locks him up (after a bit of a fight) and runs him through...

Published in 2015 by YWAM Publishing . Read by Tim Gregory. Duration: 4 hours, 55 minutes. Unabridged. YWAM Publishing offers a series of biographies of Christian "heroes of history" aimed at home school students. The fact that this was part of series about "Christian" heroes was a surprise to me since this book didn't mention Hershey's faith at all. Nevertheless, this is an interesting and enjoyable biography of one of America's most successful businessmen, Milton Hershey (1857-1945). Milton Hershey: More than Chocolate is a book showcasing the value of persistence. Starting with a failed attempt by his father in the oilfields of Pennsylvania in the late 1850's, the first half of this book is a series of business failures from Milton Hershey and his father, Henry. Henry Hershey was more of a dreamer sort of entrepreneur - prone to rash decisions, excited by new technology and not very good on doing the follow up work to make sure that the ventur...

Originally published in 2014. Audiobook version published in 2018. Read by the author, Ron Stallworth. Duration: 5 hours, 50 minutes. Unabridged. Black Klansman is the memoir of Ron Stallworth, at the time the only African American detective in the Colorado Springs Police Department (this was the 1970's), wrote a letter in response to a classified ad. It was looking for recruits to the Ku Klux Kan. Stallworth expressed his interest and thoughtlessly signed his own name, rather than an undercover name. Soon enough, the Klan leader called the number and Stallworth found himself being recruited. Clearly, Stallworth couldn't show up in person so he created a little task force complete with a white undercover officer pretending to be Stallworth, when needed. Eventually, Stallworth had a membership card (!) and having frequent phone conversations with David Duke, the most famous KKK leader in the country. The premise of the book was, sadly, more interesting than the follow through. ...

      A thriller that totally sucked me right in even though I knew I was being manipulated. Published in 2008 by Minotaur Books C.J. Box goes right for the blatantly obvious emotional heartstrings in Three Weeks to Say Goodbye , a thriller that totally sucked me right in even though I knew I was being manipulated. Jack and Melissa McGuane are the proud and loving parents of a nine month old baby girl that they adopted at birth. Everything is going well even though their budget is stretched and Jack's time is stretched with a high-pressure job. Everything is going well, that is, until Jack gets a phone call from the adoption agency they used saying that the birth father never gave up his rights (although the agency assured them that it did) and the birth father wants the baby. When the McGuanes protest they quickly discover that the baby's grandfather is a powerful federal judge who is so connected that he is on the fast track to the Supreme Court. The judge ...

Often frustrating. Sometimes shocking. Never boring. Read by Tom Weiner Duration: 10 hours, 24 minutes. Blackstone Audio Unabridged. Robert A. Heinlein was recognized many times over as a master of the science fiction tale – he is a multiple winner of the Hugo award and the first recipient of the Grand Master Award for lifetime achievement. Heinlein is one of those golden age writers that moved science fiction from being stories strictly for kids to a separate and recognized literary genre for adults, too. Farnham’s Freehold is, at best, a difficult book. Perhaps books like this were a requirement when moving science fiction from a kid’s genre to an adult genre. It seems that Heinlein the iconoclast was out to irritate as many sensibilities as possible in an attempt to question some of society’s long held ideas about race, sex and the male-female relationships, even if it caused the story to suffer at the expense of all of that questioning. The story first appeare...