THE FREE FALL of WEBSTER CUMMINGS (audiobook) by Tom Bodett

 

Originally published in 1995 by Brilliance Audio.
Read by the author, Tom Bodett.
Duration: 15 hours, 43 minutes.
Unabridged.

The author and narrator.

I think Tom Bodett's End of the Road series of short stories is just one of the best audiobook experiences out there. Technically, this book is part of that series even though almost none of it takes places in that oddball community of End of the Road, Alaska (it earned its name by being, well, the place where the road ends.)

Bodett is well-known as a frequent panelist on the NPR show Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! but he is most well-known for his voiceovers for Motel 6 in which he promised in his folksy way, "We'll leave the light on for you."

I say all of this just to say that this book was a major disappointment. 

Everything about this book seems like it should work. It has a grounding in his Alaska stories. It consists of a series of short stories - his area of expertise.

But, there is just way too much going on in this book. There are way too many plotlines going on and Bodett tries to weave them together so they all tie up in a couple of nice little knots at the end and he just doesn't get it done.

There are two plotlines from Alaska, two plotlines from Seattle (one is mysteriously dropped about 1/3 into the book), a cross country plotline from New York City and Los Angeles, a family from Ohio that heads west in stages to find themselves (one finds that Indiana may be far enough west), supernatural forces, PTSD, memory loss, mysticism and a man named Webster Cummings who fell more than a mile from a commercial jet plane over New England and survived. Webster near death experience inspired him to find his biological parents. 

Just too much and I just ended up wanting it to end.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE FREE FALL of WEBSTER CUMMINGS (audiobook) by Tom Bodett.
.

THE LAST ENGLISHMAN: THRU-HIKING the PACIFIC CREST TRAIL (Thru-Hiking Adventures #2) (kindle) by Keith Foskett

 

Published in 2014.

I have a real weakness for oddball travel books. I have read a memoir about a man that hitchhiked throughout Europe and North Africa, a book about a man's bicycle trip from the UK to India, a book about a man who walked across Afghanistan, a book about a man who rode a motorcycle around the edges of Afghanistan, a book about two women who biked from Turkey to China, a book about a man who walked the length of the Nile, a man who walked the Appalachian Trail with his deeply irresponsible friend from high school...and more. And more. And more.

This book fits in best with my book about the 2,190 mile Appalachian Trail because it is set on the American West's counterpart to that trail: The 2,650 mile Pacific Crest Trail. This trail runs from Mexico to Canada through California, Oregon, and Washington State. 

Foskett is an experienced long-distance hiker but this hike is a challenge for any hiker to complete in a single attempt. The threat of snow in the mountain passes doesn't let hikers start very early up north so hikers start down south and hope to catch a break with the weather. They hike north and try to keep up a good pace so they don't get caught by snow up in the mountains in Washington State as winter comes on.

A great pace is 30 miles per day and even if a hiker can keep that pace up through the worst of the passes, that still makes a 3 month hike. But, hikers don't keep up that pace. They have to take time off of the trail to resupply, pick up pre-mailed packages, rest, and tend to injuries or illness. One can't discount the need to pop off of the trail to literally eat thousands and thousands of calories or simply take a break.

A major theme of the book is Foskett's constant push to make enough miles but this reader was dismayed at how many times he turned a day off of the trail into two or three days in a hiker friendly hotel. I kept on saying, "Go! You're going to get caught in the snow!" Turns out, that's where the title comes from - he ends up so late on the trail that he calls himself "The Last Englishman."

But, my worry about his wasting time and not making it is really a sign that I was invested in this story. It was good enough that I went ahead and bought another  book by Foskett that tells the tale of another long-distance hike. Plus, I am a sucker for oddball travel books. 

I rate this e-book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE LAST ENGLISHMAN: THRU-HIKING the PACIFIC CREST TRAIL by Keith Foskett.

Follow this link to see my review of another book by this author. In that book, he hikes the Camino de Santiago in Spain and France.

SHADOWS REEL (Joe Picket #22) (audiobook) by C.J. Box

 

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

There was almost no "game wardening" in this book and the man who is derisively called "nature boy" in this book spends 99% of this book navigating the urban world of Black Lives Matter and Antifa.

I have complained in my review of the 20th book in this series, Long Range, that Joe Pickett was getting involved in so many other types of police cases that it is easy to forget that the first books in the series - the books that made me start and keep reading a series - were mostly about game warden activities. Lots of searching for poachers. There was a book about eco-terrorists, one with survivalist weirdos and even a big forest fire.

This book seemed to be careening from one political commentary after another - BLM, Antifa, even Hungary. What does the author say? Antifa - irredeemably stupid. BLM - understandable, but over the top. Hungary, despite the popularity of its President in ultra-conservative circles, is linked in this book with violent reaction over careful consideration.

Is this what the author intended? I have no idea. He seems to be making a lot of political comments in his books lately in the Joe Pickett and the Cassie Dewell series. Some are subtle, some are not. I assume that is what he's pulling his characters out of the Wyoming countryside and placing them in cities all over the West, but maybe not. Maybe I am reading too much into it. Either way, I want Joe Pickett to get his butt back into the woods!

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: SHADOWS REEL (Joe Picket #22) by C.J. Box.

BURNING BRIGHT (Peter Ash #2) (audiobook) by Nick Petrie

 

Published by Penguin Audio in 2017.

Read by Stephen Mendel.
Duration: 11 hours, 55 minutes.
Unabridged.

Synopsis:

Peter Ash is a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has had trouble settling in to civilian life. Specifically, he has a fear of enclosed places. He is good with his hands and restored an old pickup truck. He drives the truck all over the place and explores America by hiking and camping.

The author, Nick Petrie

As Burning Bright starts, Ash is hiking in a forest of giant redwoods and stumbles upon a bear, climbs a tree, meets a girl in the trees, finds out she is being hunted by a professional hit team and that's when everything starts to really get interesting...

My Review:

I like this series, even though it suffers a bit of a sophomore slump in my opinion. This is not to say that it is a bad book - it's not. I am rating this book 4 stars out of 5. I flew through the first half of the book, but the second half of the book was just a bit too ridiculous in my opinion. That being said, I am going to happily continue with this series.

I think you have to start the series at the beginning (click here for my review of the first book in the series) so do not start with this book. 

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: BURNING BRIGHT (Peter Ash #2) (audiobook) by Nick Petrie.

DEVOLUTION: A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of the RANIER SASQUATCH MASSACRE (audiobook) by Max Brooks

 

Published in 2020 by Random House Audio.
Read by multiple readers (see text of review).
Duration: 9 hours, 50 minutes.
Unabridged.

The premise for the novel Devolution is that a leader in the tech industry has built a completely new type of housing development in rural Washington state.  They are designed to use as little energy as possible, recycle the human waste and run on solar panels. The community is small and isolated - just a few homes in order to lessen the overall environmental impact.

If you are old enough to remember the Mt. St. Helen eruption in 1980, in this novel, the same thing happens to Mt. Ranier. This is a complete possibility in real life and it is generally believed that the consequences would be much, much worse with Mt. Ranier.

When Ranier erupts, this community is completely isolated by the chaos that follows. The government is doing the best it can, but this is a full-blown crisis and a few missing people in the woods (even if they are rich and connected) can't compare to the floods, bridge failures, landslides, thousands of other missing people and the thousands and thousands of refugees that have fled the area. 

This little community is on its own.

When a cougar enters their neighborhood and tries to hunt a child, they know that the animals' patterns have also been disrupted and top-level predators are desperate.

Too bad for these people that there is something that is bigger and tougher than cougars that is also hunting them...

This audiobook starts out very slowly. I almost gave up on it at the 90 minute mark. But, I gave it a few minutes more and suddenly I was looking for chances to keep listening. 

Like Max Brooks' best-known book, World War Z, the book is not told as a traditional story. The book pretends to be a detailed investigation of what happened to this little community and its residents. 

Primarily, the book is told from the point of view of a young married woman who comes out to this remote little housing development with her husband to sort out her life a bit. She keeps a very detailed journal on the advice of her therapist and the "author" of the book pulls from that journal. They are living in her big brother's house - business had pulled him away from moving into he new development when it opened and he thought she could use this time away from the big city. 

It contains a lot of interviews with different people who were attached to the community in one way or another. Each is voiced by a different actor, including Nathan Fillion, Kate Mulgrew, Mira Furlan and Judy Greer. If you didn't notice, Max Brooks has found actors from the sci-fi TV shows Firefly, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Lost,the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the re-boot franchise of Planet of the Apes. I doubt it was intentional that so many of these voice actors were from iconic science fiction franchises, but still...nicely done. 

Two segments were "interviews" with two of the characters that were supposedly broadcast on NPR. The great thing is that they were actually conducted by NPR personality Kai Ryssdal and Terry Gross and they were so realistic that I thought my download was messed up and I ended up with an NPR podcast stuck in the middle of it. 

Mira Furlon's voice was a welcome surprise since she passed away just 6 months ago. She probably only had 10 minutes of audio, but she voiced my favorite character in a profound moment that hit me double hard when it was delivered with her voice.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5 - the very slow start hurts the overall score. But, still a very good audiobook. It can be found on Amazon.com here: DEVOLUTION: A FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of the RANIER SASQUATCH MASSACRE (audiobook) by Max Brooks.

THE HOUSE of DANIEL: A NOVEL of WILD MAGIC, the GREAT DEPRESSION, and SEMIPRO BALL by Harry Turtledove

Published in 2016 by Tom Doherty Associates (A Tor Book)

Harry Turtledove specializes in alternate histories. Usually, he has a big twist - what if the South won the Civil War? What if Atlantis were a real continent? What if the Colonies lost the Revolutionary War? What if MacArthur actually dropped atomic bombs during the Korean War?

The House of Daniel is a different kind of story, with a twist.

To be perfectly honest, I read the description of this book, with its references to The Great Depression, baseball, "hotshot wizards" and zombies and missed the fact that it was actually referring to actual wizards and zombies, not metaphorical wizards (the whiz kid experts that FDR hired) and zombies (the unemployed masses who are desperate for work). I really thought that Turtledove had just written a straight book about semipro baseball in the Great Depression.

And, basically he has. 85% of this story is about baseball.

Jack Spivey does odd jobs, plays semipro baseball for a few bucks a game and a little muscle work for a local mobster-type named Big Stu in Enid, Oklahoma. He is contracted to go to a neighboring town to give a beating to the sibling of a client that is behind on his payments. When the sibling turns out to be a beautiful young woman, Jack can't do it. Instead, he takes a position with a traveling semipro baseball team called "The House of Daniel" and hits the road.

If you don't like baseball, this book will bore you to tears. Jack tells about his life on the road and about dozens of baseball games - sometimes in great detail, with play by play and even pitch by pitch descriptions. 

But, the world that they live in is a little off from our world. Major League Baseball exists, but none of the names are recognizable. Magic exists - regular magic, dark magic and even religious magic. So do vampires. And zombies. And magic carpets. And mystery creatures like chupacabras. 

I really enjoyed this book, despite my original confusion. 

I rate this book 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: THE HOUSE of DANIEL: A NOVEL of WILD MAGIC, the GREAT DEPRESSION, and SEMIPRO BALL by Harry Turtledove.

THE DEADER the BETTER (Leo Waterman #6) by G.M. Ford

Originally published in 2000.

The Deader the Better features Private Investigator Leo Waterman - a well-connected man in Seattle. His dad was a mover and shaker in the best and worst uses of the term. He knew all of the "beautiful people" at the top and he knew all of underworld people as well. Leo has not chosen to go into politics. But, he uses those family connections to help people who come to him, including a group of homeless drunks that Leo watches after because they all worked for his father in one capacity or another. Leo also hires them to do surveillance because no one really wants to notice the homeless guy shambling down the street.

This book starts out with a missing persons case - a thirteen year old girl has run away from a sexually abusive home and is now on the streets. Leo tracks her down to a certain pimp and swings into action.

After that case, Leo and his serious girlfriend head out of town to meet some friends - a couple and their children who are trying to start a fishing camp for high rollers. But, he is having trouble. He claims the local government officials are after him and are trying to force him out of business. Leo dismisses the whole idea. But, when they visit a few months later, they find the house has been shot up, is partially burned, the husband is dead and the wife and kids have disappeared.

So, Leo swings into action with a whole crew of from Seattle...

According to my blog, I haven't read a Leo Waterman book for 15 years. That really surprised me. But, it felt like I hadn't skipped a beat. These are not amazing mysteries, but they are certainly unique and entertaining.

I rate this book 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: The Deader the Better (Leo Waterman #6) by G.M. Ford.

BROKEN (Daniel Briggs #3) (audiobook) by C.G. Cooper

Published by Tantor Audio in February of 2017.
Read by David Colacci.
Duration: 6 hours, 23 minutes.
Unabridged.

Broken features Daniel Briggs, a former sniper and a war veteran who is struggling to incorporate himself back into society. He suffers from PTSD in the form of anger control issues. Until recently, he copes by drinking, although in this book he has put the bottle aside. He also copes by drifting from job to job and place to place, avoiding deep connections.

While in Seattle, working at a fish market, Briggs encounters an elderly woman wandering the streets with an 8x10 photo of her son, a war veteran who disappeared when he returned. Briggs decides to look into the situation and soon discovers that there are a lot of missing veterans and this is part of something much larger then he had ever imagined.

The Daniel Briggs character is reminiscent of Lee Child's Reacher character and fans of Reacher might want to check this series out. I liked the Briggs character but the actual conspiracy that he confronts was too over the top for me. Plus, the plot twists were just too twisty for me as well.

David Colacci's voice was perfect for Briggs - gravelly, but not over the top.

I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Broken by C.G. Cooper.

Morning of Fire: John Kendrick's Daring American Odyssey in the Pacific by Scott Ridley

Well-researched but ultimately fails in its goal

Published by William Morrow in 2010

John Kendrick was a well-respected sailor from the Boston area during the Revolutionary War era. He was rumored to have participated in the Boston Tea Party. He captained a privateer, captured prizes and was highly regarded by political and business leaders and the men who sailed on his ships.

As America struggled to revive its foreign trade after the Revolutionary War (The United States was officially cut off from English trade) tales came to Boston about the beautiful furs available along the Northern Pacific coast of North America. Investors hired Kendrick to lead an expedition of two ships to explore the trading opportunities in the Pacific. Kendrick set off in 1787 to find new markets for American goods. He ended up visiting what is now Alaska, Washington State and British Columbia, Hawaii, China and Japan. He nearly sparked a war between Spain and England, got involved in a brutal war in Hawaii, nearly was killed by officials in Japan (if he had been discovered), survived a monsoon, suffered through the bureaucratic shenanigans of Chinese port officials and was betrayed by the captain of the second ship of his expedition.

Reading about all of that adventure makes Morning of Fire sound like it would be exciting, but this book does not live up to the exciting life lived by Kendrick.

What this book does well:

-This book is extraordinarily well researched. I would imagine that Ridley laid his eyes on every known scrap of paper that mentioned Kendrick or his voyage that has survived to the modern day. He includes dispatches sent to the court of Spain and England, notes from his American employers and more.

-America's place in the geopolitical situation of the day is laid out nicely. Spain was declining, Britain was pushing to take over its role as master of the Pacific, Russia was pushing into the Northern Pacific from its Asian ports, France was floundering in the throes of the French Revolution, China was involved in trade only, Hawaii was coveted by all of the major powers as a place to refit ships in the middle of the Pacific.

What this book does poorly:

-Ridley establishes that Kendrick was the first American in the area and he compares him to the likes of Daniel Boone and explorers Lewis and Clark. However, that is not an apt comparison. Daniel Boone and his generation of explorers directly led to the American occupation of the Ohio River Valley and the Tennessee Valley. Lewis and Clark's route to the Pacific, especially their trip up the Missouri River was, quite literally, the route taken by hundreds and later thousands of settlers within a generation or two of their trip. Kendrick's men were the first Americans to reach the Washington State area, but it was largely settled by Americans who followed Lewis and Clark's route.

-I found this book caught up in its own minutiae, and the larger goal (why Kendrick's long trip was important) was lost in the ups and downs of fur prices and blow-by-blow details of negotiations. I learned about the prices of furs in China, the nasty wars of Hawaii's various kings and how Western involvement was a factor, about how England and Spain nearly came to war over the Pacific (what Kendrick does not stress is that England and Spain nearly came to war over some thing or another many, many times while England was ascending and Spain was declining on the world stage). Spain's strategies to recapture its actual control of the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys (it had the Mississippi Valley in name, but not much control in reality) were discussed. So much detail was involved that I often felt like I was slogging through the book. The telling of the story drowns in the sea of details. When Ridley pulled out of full detail mode the book was quite excellent. But then the extraneous details would start to fill the book again. I literally read dozens of histories a year and I am a history teacher. I love reading history and this book was a chore for me to read.

-Too much of the historical record has been lost. Ridley has reference after reference to what Kendrick "may have" or "probably" did. While these leaps of faith and logic all made sense, it may have been more prudent for the author to have pulled away from his devotion to detail and simply lay out the facts he had and tell the story in a broader sense rather than insisting on a detailed look at facts he really did not have.

I rate this history 2 stars out of 5.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Morning of Fire.

Reviewed on May 12, 2012.

The Pied Piper (abridged audiobook) by Ridley Pearson

Great twists. Good book. Abridged version leaves some things out.

Published by Brilliance Audio
Read by Dale Hull
Duration: About 3 hours
Abridged

Just to let you know, I heard The Pied Piper as an abridged audiobook. I will discuss specific issues about the audiobook aspect of it later.

This was a scary, sad thriller. Children are being abducted from their bedrooms across Seattle and, in reality, all across the country and Seattle's finest are out to stop the kidnappings. Obstacles in their path include very poor teamwork with the FBI and there's another kidnapping very close to home...but I won't spoil it for you by telling you who.

Good police work ensues and it is satisfying to go along with the police as they slowly amass their clues and get closer and closer. Once the reader finds out the truth, there's still quite a bit of work to do to wrap it all up - including a cross-country chase.

Its a good, good thriller and I would have given it 5 stars but I am reviewing the abridged book on tape and I have some complaints:

1. The reader does great dialogue but is poor at reading non-dialogue - everything sounds breathless and over-hyped. Very William Shatner-esque, if you catch my meaning.

2. The abridgment apparently left out a part of the story concerning Idaho - it is barely referenced early on and then the suspect has an injury on the face due to an accident suffered in Idaho that everyone seems to know about. That is not an example of a skillful abridgment.

I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5.

This audiobook can be found on Amazon.com here: The Pied Piper (abridged).

Reviewed on September 20, 2004.

Slow Burn (Leo Waterman Mysteries) by G.M. Ford

Good but had such potential to be better

Published in 1998 by William Morrow.

I was told that Slow Burn was a disappointment. I have to agree and disagree. It is a good book - it really does approach the level of being a great farce of a detective novel. The client is outrageous and the people he investigates are larger than life throughout the story. At times, Waterman is the only sane man in the room. It makes it a fun ride - but I finished the book pleased but quite sure that it could have been even more if Ford had pushed a bit more. I would have liked for him to have met other bizarre personages that were attending the food show, but the climactic scene at the steakhouse with the helicopter and the barbecue was certainly odd and funny enough in its own right.

Like all of the Waterman novels, it may behoove the reader to jot down some notes as you go along because the author does little to remind the reader who the characters are as the story progresses. The murder victim is introduced and not mentioned again until he is killed about 100 pages later. I had to think hard about who this guy was and why it was important to the story that he was dead.

I would recommend reading the other Waterman books (Who In Hell is Wanda Fuca?, Cast in Stone, The Bum's Rush) before reading this one.

I give this book a "4 stars" out of 5 - fun but I'm struck by the unrealized potential.

This book can be found on Amazon.com here: Slow Burn.

Reviewed on August 4, 2004.