DWD's Reviews

To be published by Amazon Original Stories in February of 2025. If you have Amazon Prime, you get to choose from a limited selection of soon-to-be-published e-books every month. I am a big fan of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books, so I jumped at the chance to get this short story by Lee Child. I believe I have read every book and every short story that Lee Child has written about Jack Reacher, but I don't think I've read anything he's written that didn't feature Reacher. In fact, I didn't know he wrote about any character but Reacher. This is the story of a mathematician - a college professor. He's kind of a nobody, except that he has a specialty, some would say a gift, in an obscure little corner of mathematics. Not many people have even heard of it, let alone know anything about it.  Then, one day, he gets a call from the White House... My review: This was a quick story. It is well-written and takes several twists and turns that I did not see coming.  It'...

Published by Amazon Original Stories on November 1, 2024. Synopsis: In Ushers , Martin Lorensen is being questioned by two federal agents that have noticed that he almost died twice in two mass casualty incidents. One was a school shooting that primarily took place in the classroom he shared with the shooter when he was in high school. He got to school that day, but turned around and went home when he got to the front doors - just a few minutes before the shooting started. The other was a tremendous train crash - he almost got onto the train - he was at the station with ticket in hand and walked away after telling a girl and her mom to not get on the train. The federal agents are curious. Is he some sort of terrorist that sets up mass casualty events? Or, is he the luckiest man on the East Coast? My review: This is a well-told short story with an ending  that would have been a welcome addition to the Rod Serling's old Twilight Zone series. I rate this story 5 stars out of 5. It can...

Published by Amazon Original Stories in 2023. Synopsis: There has been a murder in one of the newest and most exclusive high rise apartments in London. The night security guard in the lobby was found dead by his girlfriend (she used to sneak in for a little romancing in the middle of the night.) His head was smashed into the corner of the counter and a fancy electronic door key is missing from the collection of spare keys in the office. When detectives start asking around it looks like just about everyone in the apartment building could have killed the guard, including the girlfriend. My review: The first half of this story was pretty tedious. The way the crime was finally solved was kind of obvious - and I missed it! I rate this short story 3 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: T he Rise: A Short Story by Ian Rankin .

Published in 2009 by HarperAudio. Read by Stephen Lang. Duration: 2 hours, 25 minutes. Unabridged. My Synopsis: In 1971 a relatively unknown director made an ABC made for TV movie called Duel . The plot was simple enough - a traveling salesman is harassed by a semi-truck on a nearly empty desert highway. Spielberg took this opportunity and turned it into the movie that made his career. Now, Duel is a cult classic. Before the movie was made, there was  the short story of the same name. Richard Matheson wrote the short story and the screenplay. Joe Hill and Stephen King added a second story called Throttle to this collection. It features a motorcycle gang trying to decide their next steps after a botched attempt to find some missing money that resulted in a brutal murder. Suddenly, a semi-truck catches up to the gang and begins to pick them off one by one. My Review: Duel was a very good short story. It draws you in and keeps you involved to the end.  Throttle is told well, ...

Published by Blackstone Audio in 2007. Read by Stefan Rudnicki. Duration: 54 minutes. Unabridged. Louis L'Amour (1908-1988) was an amazingly prolific writer with a career that lasted 50 years. He wrote up to 200 books, both novels and non-fiction works, depending on how you count them up, but he began writing short stories for magazines. I assume The Black Rock Coffin Makers is one of those stories. Synopsis: A cowboy rides into a strange town hundreds of miles away from home. He is immediately mistaken for a local man who was driven out of town and possibly killed by ruthless competitors so that he couldn't make a claim on a ranch. He looks so much like the other man that armed man try to kill him within minutes of arriving in town. Luckily, he runs into a local woman who is also involved in this mess and that's when the real adventure starts... My Review: This story starts out very strong. I was immediately drawn in. But, as it went along it just lost some of its steam. ...

Published in 2014 by WordFire Press My Synopsis: Veteran (and prolific) author Kevin J. Anderson delivers a compelling short story/novella in the tradition of the golden age of sci-fi with Comrades in Arms .  Humanity is at war with an insectoid race that uses psychic energy to create weapons and even peer into the future.  The story is set in an asteroid belt way out in the middle of nowhere. Some of the asteroids have breathable atmospheres, but they're not comfortable for either race to live on for long.  Even though the asteroids have limited value, there is no way either side will give them up so the war has ground itself into a stalemate of sorts.  However, humanity has developed a new weapon that is starting to turn the tide. Mortally wounded humans are brought back to the base and given the Robocop treatment. Their bodies are refitted with armored limbs, organs are replaced, and a "werewolf trigger" is installed deep in the brain. The werewolf trigger sets th...

Published in 2004 by Random House Audio as a book on cassette. Published in 2008 as a digital audiobook. Multicast performance. Duration: 1 hour, 8 minutes. Unabridged. Louis L'Amour (1908-1988) wrote well more than 100 novels and non-fiction works - maybe 200, depending on how you count them up. If you count individual short stories, you can add in hundreds more. L'Amour's writing career started out as a short story writer for magazines, beginning in 1938. I assume that this short story started out in a magazine but I could not find any record of when or where it was originally published.  The Turkeyfeather Riders was adapted from a short story into old style radio play for this production. This includes special effects and multiple actors playing different characters.  My synopsis. The plot is pretty simple. Jim Sandifer is a ranch foreman. He and his widower boss get along fabulously, but when his boss comes home with a fiancé and her son, Sandifer becomes suspicious of...

Published in 2024 by Amazon Original Stories. The premise of Tiger Chair is that it is a frank letter from a mid-level Chinese officer to a friend back home. World War III has been going on for a while. It started over the invasion of Taiwan and has now spread around the world. Chinese forces are active on many fronts, including India. China has also attacked the United States in the mistaken belief that America's racial diversity and political animosities would cause American resolve to crumble and it would be a short war. This has turned out to be wrong and the invasion has turned into occupation duty and occupation duty has always been terrible.  I think Brooks has an actual agenda with this book and it is a warning. It is not a warning about China. It is a warning about over-dependence on technology and the foolishness of war. On top of that, it is so easy for one country to think that they have a realistic take on another country's internal politics and culture when they ...

  E-book published in 2022 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road The Mysterious Profile series' title pretty much sums up what the series is all about. They are short profiles of famous lead characters in mystery series in the words of the authors themselves. Sometimes they are interviews in which the authors tell about the inspiration for the characters. Other times, they are scenes in which the characters explain themselves. This profile is of the wisecracking detective Spenser created by Robert B. Parker. Parker (1933-2010) wrote 40 novels featuring wisecracking private detective Spenser and literally had a heart attack and died at his desk writing the 41st novel. The Spenser books are the mold of any modern book series featuring a principled and competent investigator with a tough, mostly silent friend of dubious morality to back him up. This model is followed in the current-day book series of Elvis Cole by Robert Crais and Joe Pickett by C.J. Box .  The problem of having Par...

  Published in 2018 by Simon and Schuster Audio. Read by the author, Stephen King Duration: 3 hours, 46 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King has a long history of publishing collections of short stories. I am usually not a fan of short stories, but I have no problem with a Stephen King short story. I think King is so good at making characters that the reader can identify with in such a short amount of time. This collection is pretty short - just two short stories. Both feature older men. The author In one, we have a man living in Maine with a supernatural problem and also a misunderstanding with his neighbors. This one really feels like two stories, but it was pretty touching. In the second story, a desperately lonely widower living in the Florida Keys is brought a gift by his older sister to get him up and moving again - a puppy. These are both good stories - very enjoyable and always with a twist. They were read by Stephen King. It was neither a good thing nor a bad thing - his acce...

  Published in 2014 by Little A. Kodi Scheer was the writer-in-residence at a cancer center when she wrote this collection of short stories. They all have two things in common: 1) a focus on female characters and 2) a medical tie-in. This picture goes with the first story. Normally, I struggle with short story collections - they don't develop the characters enough or they tell too little for the reader to get any sort of handle on what is going on until the story is practically over.  This collection has a couple of weird stories that fit those characterizations, but it is mostly a set of strong stories that actually gets better as it goes along.  As I mentioned, there is a medical theme throughout the stories, but there is also a strong dose of the supernatural throughout these stories as well.   I rate this short story collection 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: INCENDIARY GIRLS: STORIES by Kodi Scheer .

  Published by Macmillan Audio in 2019. Originally published by Tor Books in 2011. Read by P.J. Ochlan. Duration: 47 minutes. Unabridged. When the President notices that he can't force his head to go underwater during his morning swim and he complains of being lightheaded, his aides take him off for a medical checkup.  The author, John Scalzi During the checkup, the President's doctor determines that the President does indeed have a major medical problem - his brain is missing but he continues to walk and talk like normal. His aides scramble to try to figure out what may have caused this and what they should do. ****** First things first in this hyper-political time: This audiobook is not a commentary on either President Trump or President Biden since the story was originally published during the first term of the Obama's presidency. In a way, this is very much a piece of throwback science fiction, like a Twilight Zone story. It takes a weird premise and runs with it for a ...

  Published in 1982 by Pocket Books (a Timescape book) Back in the 1980's Simon and Schuster had a division called Pocket Books that specialized in paperback books. Pocket Books had an even smaller division called Timescape . Timescape published sci-fi books, including some of the earliest of the Star Trek novels so they were quite a successful line. Soldier Boy is part of that Timescape line. Michael Shaara (1928-1988) Michael Shaara won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, The Killer Angels . Shaara had knocked out a few novels before then, but none were about the Civil War. Instead, a great deal of his writing was sci-fi. He started out selling stories to magazines in 1951. This book is a collection of 14 of those short stories. If you read this book, I recommend reading the Author's Afterword first. He wrote commentary on every story and I used those notes as an introduction to each one.  Like all short story collections, they vary in qu...

Published in 2014 by Hachette Audio. Read by Len Cariou. Duration: 50 minutes. Unabridged. This short story was the closest thing to a straight out police procedural that I have read from Michael Connelly. By that, I mean that although Harry Bosch is the main character in this story, it really is just the story of how a police officer reviews a cold case and figures out who the bad guy is based on one new clue. Any police officer could have been the main character because Harry Bosch was just sort of along for the ride. Len Cariou read the book. Cariou used to read a lot of Connelly's books. Now The narrator, Len Cariou, at the dinner table on his TV show. Cariou is best known as the grandfather on the TV show Blue Bloods and I kept imagining that he was reading it to me at the dinner table from the TV show, which kind of ruined the mood of the story (not that it was much of a story). I rate this short story 2 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Switchblade ...

Published in 2018 by Delacorte Press. In this 26 page short story, Reacher is near Barstow, California. He always heads south for the winter and he assumed that Barstow would be south enough to avoid the winter cold. But, a once-in-a-lifetime blizzard hits the area, the power is cut off, the phones are down and Reacher is walking through three feet of snow along an impassable highway (to cars, at least). He stumbles upon a bar and inside finds a bartender an older couple and two British soldiers... The Christmas Scorpion is exclusively published as an e-book. Lee Child was a prolific author (he has since retired) and it is not uncommon for him to generate additional short stories featuring Jack Reacher. These short stories are a mixed bag, at best. I don't know Lee Child's writing process. Some authors plan out every detail meticulously before they start writing, others claim to make up the entire story as they go along - they are finding out what happens as they write. I...

Published in 2015 by Simon and Schuster Audio Read by Tim Sample. Duration: 1 hour, 20 minutes. Unabridged. Stephen King uses the voice talents of Tim Sample, a humorist that specializes in talking about Maine. Fans of Stephen King know that the prolific author loves to set his stories in his home state of Maine. This one is set on the corner of a lake surrounded by vacation homes. Two families are part of a year-after-year fireworks contest. One is a family from Rhode Island. The other is an older mom and son who grew up in the area and bought their dream home on the lake. They don't know each other well, but their sense of pride get in the way as their desire to "one up" each other gets more and more ridiculous as the years go along. The folksy manner of the narrator makes this predictable story a lot of fun. It is the perfect matching of author and narrator. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: Drunken Fireworks by Stephen King.

Published by Author's Republic in 2019. Multicast performance. Duration: 1 hour, 11 minutes. Unabridged This audiobook is a mixed bag. I will start with the positive side. The multicast performance in this audiobook is really, really good. The voice actors perform it like an old-fashioned radio play and they are excellent. It even has sound effects that are timed right, set to the right sound level and are not obnoxious. The story is another matter. It starts out with one plot (two university professors trying to grow the size of the practically nonexistent faculty labor union at a small private university in Indiana), drifts into a second story line and finally moves into a third, rather bizarre story thread that doesn't even come close to addressing the original conflict in this 71 minute story. This audiobook just slides around like a nervous six year old tells a story to a bunch of adults at a family get-together. I rate this audiobook 2 stars out of 5. It gets 2 stars be...

Published in 2014 by Random House Audio. Read by Dick Hill. Duration: 1 hour, 27 minutes. Unabridged Lee Child was a prolific writer of Jack Reacher stories. I say was because he recently announced his intention to stop writing those stories. His brother will start writing them instead. Child wrote numerous books and short stories in no particular order, bouncing around the timeline of Jack Reacher's life. Not a Drill is set in Maine. I presume it fits in on the timeline with the other Reacher stories that take place in Maine and New England. Jack Reacher is hitchhiking to the end of I-95 at the U.S.-Canada border. Another of his books starts at the other end of I-95 down by Miami, Florida and Reacher makes a point that he wants to have traveled from one end of the road to the other. Once he gets there, he gets out and is soon picked up by three younger Canadians who are headed to a four day long hiking trip. Their trail starts at one town and ends up at another. Reacher decid...

Published in 2015 by Random House Audio. Narrated by Dick Hill Duration: 1 hour, 30 minutes Unabridged Lee Child. Photo by Mark Coggins Jack Reacher is back in his Military Police days in this short story. He has been moved to a new base in Georgia and immediately has a murder to investigate - a new female intelligence officer who is beautiful, rich and is on the fast track to the top is found dead beside her Porsche on a country road near the base. Jack Reacher starts to dig and quickly puts all of the pieces together in a satisfying, but too-short story. All of the stuff you love about a Reacher novel are here:  smart comments, a little bit of fighting, quick thinking and an ending that makes you think about the difference between what is legal and what is just. Dick Hill's narration is spot-on, like always. I rate this audiobook 4 stars out of 5. This audiobook short story can be found on Amazon.com here: Small Wars by Lee Child .

Humor, Like Food, Is Highly Subjective Published by Symphony Space in October of 2010 Multi-cast performance Duration: 3 hours, 6 minutes Here is the premise behind Selected Shorts: Even More Laughs - get a collection of funny short stories and have them be read by great performers such as Stephen Colbert and Alec Baldwin. There are eight stories of varying quality. As I noted in the title of this review, humor is very subjective. What I can really tell you is that this set is designed to appeal to a wide variety of tastes - not by being middle of the road but by bringing a true eclectic mix to the production. That is certain to guarantee that the listener will not enjoy everything. Stephen Colbert begins the collection with "The Lie",  the story Jerry Zaks (b. 1946), one of the performers in this collection. of a man who is just overwhelmed with being the father of a new baby. In fact, he is overwhelmed with everything - his dead end job, his wife's new confiden...