Cholmondeley

Don Winslow hits one out of the park.

Revisado: 01-19-23

Winslow is one of the best and most versatile of American. This book is a fine addition to his oeuvre.

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A long, annoying, letter from camp.

Revisado: 01-27-20

I can't finish listening to this. When doing monotonous tasks I'll listen to almost anything so long as the reader's voice isn't annoying (to me) and so long as the story, when I'm paying attention to it, isn't annoying. Here both the voice and the story are: annoying.

This reader's voice is not particularly pleasant to listen to, but it it would be okay if he had a good book to read. Here, he doesn't.

"The Guardians" consists of several loosely held together stories. None is strong enough to stand alone, and none could serve as the core of a novel. This is not good fiction, and because I know John Grisham can do so much better ("The Appeal," for example), it felt like bad novel and a bad audiobook.

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Shaggy dog story.

Revisado: 01-22-20

I read somewhere that Grisham had recovered his talent. Not with this book, which was probably as painful to write as it was to listen to. My wife got too bored to finish it. She’ll feel that her critical faculties performed well when I tell her the lame punchline that was used but failed to drive such a long story: it was too thin to drive a very short story.

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A Ten-Hour Christmas Letter

Revisado: 01-31-19

This is truly terrible. It is like the worst Christmas letter ever written. Ten hours of bloviating self-promotion.

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ALL the elements of every thriller

Revisado: 02-24-17

A retired couple built their dream house in my neighborhood. They found an architect to combine all the architectural features they had seen and admired over a lifetime. To include everything the house is at least five times bigger than a single couple can comfortably occupy. The combined effect of a merger of many, many ideas that come from several radically different styles evokes criticism from people who have never before paid attention to building design.

Ted Bell has studied the genre with care. He has assembled a sizable collection of "thriller tropes," and has crammed them all into this single novel said to the first of a series.

Thanks to the excellent narration by John Shea the result is much, much better than my neighbors' house.

The characters, settings and plot devices are familiar. The way they are combined is, well, brave. I couldn't resist listing the first thirty that came to mine when I finished listening to the novel. What follows may warrant a Spoiler Alert. Or, it might enhance the pleasure of listening to the book by creating an anticipation of these features that appear in an unpredictable order.

(1) London hotels: The Connaught (grill/bar), Claridges, The Dorchester, #10 Downing
(2) Arab sheik in mountaintop castle/fort (3) Sumo wrestler as guard (3) Gibbets with human remains (4) NFL football player >> Navy Seal >> NYPD detective (5) Garden of poison plants and trees (6) Flying and landing gliders into mountains (7) Venice - Harry's , Danelieli Hotel (8) Harem of female assassins - hashish (9) Man eating komodo dragon (10) Cigarette boats, 200' yacht (with fireplace) & various high speed boats (11) Cuban special forces operatives (10) Bride shot by sniper as she leaves church (11) Elevator rigged to allow sniper to shoot from 60' up tree (12) Butler and every other manner of servant (13) Scotland Yard inspector who spouts Sherlock Holmes (14) Kidnapping by syringe disguised as ring and helicopter (15) Chinese operatives (16) Atomic weapon design by Indian grad of Cal Tech (17) Jihadist disguised as Greek-American cop (18) Boston whaler navigation off Maine coast in thick fog (19) Exclusion of rich wannabe from private London club/restaurant (20) Atomic bomb - "linear implosion" and Harvard prof to explain it to good guys (20) Hail Mary with football shaped-bomb (21) Transcendental numbers (22) The UK PM and the US Secy of State and the US President (23) A scissors assassin (24) The 100 missing Weapons of Mass Destruction (25) Miami's Little Havana (26) Vietnam War (27) Bone fishing (28) An Arab bodyguard called TippuTip (after the Zanizabari slave trader circa 1900) (29) "Stiltsville" off Miami coast - staple in Miami action stories and the Doc Ford series (30) Mutated smallpox virus.

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Romance - not historical thriller

Revisado: 12-24-16

This is a Romance which begins interior monologues by different women sizing up physical appearance of different men. I couldn't listen to it for even a half hour.

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Disappointing

Revisado: 12-24-16

Robert Harris can write a good story about almost anything. The election of a pope is an exception. This was a disappointment in that the characters felt flat and the plot felt thin and contrived. It's impossible not to compare this to Morris West's books about the Vatican which are much better.

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Story fine but wrong narrator.

Revisado: 12-24-16

The Joe Demarco series by Mike Lawson is my favorite discovery of the year. I got most of the audiobooks through Hoopla from my local library, but the books are good enough that I'm willing to buy the rest of the series here. This is the second book, before they found Joe Barrett to narrate. The reader is Scott Brick who is a favorite of many audiobook listeners. I'm not one of them. In general I find his performances too "emotionally labile," which is something Joe Demarco is not. The deep, steady voice of Barrett in the later books is just right.

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Dissappointing

Revisado: 12-24-16

I'm a fan of the Later Grishman (eg The Appeal) but this book was early /Grishman and disappointing with respect to characters, plotting and even writing style. It's almost as if an early, rejected manuscript was pulled out of a drawer and resubmitted for publication.

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As told from the perspective of the child

Revisado: 09-17-16

Probably okay as a children's book. I got it as the daily deal and couldn't listen to more than fifteen minutes of it.

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