Douglas Sundseth
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Knockdown
- De: Dick Francis
- Narrado por: Tony Britton
- Duración: 6 h y 1 m
- Versión completa
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Historia
For a generous commission, ex-prizewinning jockey Jonah Dereham reluctantly agrees to bid on a young steeplechaser on behalf of a wealthy American woman. But his life is thrust into danger immediately following the auction, when he receives a blow to the head by two thugs demanding ownership of the horse.
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A Classic Dick Francis Story
- De Gregg MacDonald en 02-16-23
- Knockdown
- De: Dick Francis
- Narrado por: Tony Britton
Strong and atmospheric suspense
Revisado: 07-10-25
Dick Francis novels all reflect his experience as a jockey, telling stories about the inside of the horse racing business in a way that only another insider can. Francis's horseracing world is often, and his protagonists are usually voices of honor in a wilderness of corruption. This book is typical in that regard.
The protagonist, Jonah Dereham, is a retired jockey, and like many retired jockeys, it was the rigors of the track that caused his retirement. He has become a bloodstock buyer, working on commission. He is honest and hardnosed enough not to yield to threats, which, since this is a suspense novel, are rather thick on the ground.
The protagonist and the supporting characters are drawn very believably, with quirks and flaws that give them life on the page. The villains have believable motives; they're not villains only because they are evil.
The plot moves quickly, and while I figured out the final villain before the end, I didn't think his identity obvious enough to be a problem for the story.
Francis's work seems to be criminally underrepresented in the conversations about suspense and crime writers. (Perhaps it's just that I move in the wrong circles.) This is a short book, and, like the other Francis books I've read, very much worth the time. Recommended.
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Hard Kill
- A Jon Reznick Thriller, Book 2
- De: J. B. Turner
- Narrado por: Jeffrey Kafer
- Duración: 6 h y 57 m
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A senior American security adviser is missing, presumed kidnapped for his top-level military intelligence. FBI Assistant Director Martha Meyerstein needs to track him down before classified information gets into the wrong hands. She needs Jon Reznick on board. The former black-ops assassin is supposed to be on vacation with his daughter, but when Meyerstein calls, it doesn't pay to keep her waiting.
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Lots of action and sustained suspense!
- De Wayne en 04-03-17
- Hard Kill
- A Jon Reznick Thriller, Book 2
- De: J. B. Turner
- Narrado por: Jeffrey Kafer
Routine Suspense
Revisado: 07-09-25
Straightforward action/suspense with the usual multiply blinded plot.
The flow of the plot is good, with very little dead space and good progression from scene to scene. The plot itself is relatively dumb. There's not much reason for Reznick to be involved and even less for him to stay involved. And the final reveal is incredibly clichéd.
The action scenes are believable and compelling, with no obviously bad decisions by the author.
The character work is fairly well done (leaving aside the motivations of, well, nearly everyone). Once you accept the premises, the character progressions are entertaining.
With a more sensible overall plot, this would be a 4-5 star book, but as is, it's just an average suspense story. If you like suspense, there's a good chance you'll like this book, but it will never be especially memorable.
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Rebel
- Ascent to Empire, Book 2
- De: Richard Fox, David Weber
- Narrado por: Jonathan Davis
- Duración: 22 h y 38 m
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The Five Hundred, the elite families who rule the Terran Federation and control its political power and its wealth, have grown steadily wealthier and more powerful, thanks to the war against the Terran League. War may be hard on the people who get caught in its path, but it's very good for business in the short term, and the Five Hundred own the shipyards that build the Navy's ships. They own virtually all the industry that produces the weapons and material the war consumes so voraciously... and they've made damn sure someone else does the dying.
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Challenge for humanity
- De Kindle Customer en 12-04-24
- Rebel
- Ascent to Empire, Book 2
- De: Richard Fox, David Weber
- Narrado por: Jonathan Davis
Excellent Political/Military SF
Revisado: 07-09-25
The decadence of the Terran Republic (not to be confused with their bitter enemy, the Terran League) has finally triggered an existential threat from the people it has oppressed in the course of 60 years of war with the League. The series of events begun in volume one of this series is devolving to a full-blown civil war. The timing of the war is especially inopportune, since the war with the League is continuing, and the League is supported by a nearby alien empire.
The Republic's oligarchs have determined to exterminate the threat from the worlds led by Terrence Murphy, the hero of the previous book.
This book is less tightly focused on Murphy, spending more time with his allies and subordinates, which allows for a rather more intimate view of the events here. There are several well-handled fleet battles, main villains whose motivations make sense, and some good development of both the political situation and the focus characters.
This is more of a plot-driven story than a character-driven story, as is typical of novels of politics and grand strategy, though there are excellent character moments.
This is very much a series in the vein of the Honor Harrington series, with both the virtues and faults of that series. If extensive descriptions of space battles and political machinations are the thing you are looking for, this would be an excellent choice. Fortunately, I'm looking for exactly that. Highly recommended.
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Pandora's Star
- De: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrado por: John Lee
- Duración: 37 h y 21 m
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The year is 2380. The Intersolar Commonwealth, a sphere of stars some 400 light-years in diameter, contains more than 600 worlds, interconnected by a web of transport "tunnels" known as wormholes. At the farthest edge of the Commonwealth, astronomer Dudley Bose observes the impossible: Over 1,000 light-years away, a star...vanishes. It does not go supernova. It does not collapse into a black hole. It simply disappears.
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Great Epic Scifi
- De Devin en 10-17-09
- Pandora's Star
- De: Peter F. Hamilton
- Narrado por: John Lee
Slow and generic
Revisado: 07-07-25
15% of the way through this book, I have decided to abandon it. For some books, that wouldn't be enough to make an informed decision. For this book, though, that's about 50,000 words. If you can't catch my attention in the time it would take some writers to finish an entire novel, I'm afraid that I don't much care to find out if another 50,000 words will help.
We have several viewpoint characters: an astronomer, a Socialist terrorist, a police officer, several mildly corrupt politicians, an explorer/glider pilot, and a retired starship pilot. None of them have done anything interesting and none of them have displayed much in the way of personality or agency.
The purported subjects of this book, two star systems that have disappeared, perhaps behind Dyson spheres or forcefields, have been mentioned a few times, with vague intimations of peril. But virtually nothing has been done other than to say, "We should definitely investigate; let's build a starship." Oh, all those characters have done things, but nothing much has seemed to forward anything resembling a plot.
The setting is a rather generic corporate-controlled empire with suggestions of authoritarianism. There is some examination of how anti-agathics might affect the way that people think, especially as regards willingness to take risks. And there are trains that run from inhabited planet to inhabited planet through stable wormholes, which is at least interesting. Other than those things, this might be the most generic setting for an SF novel that I've read. There are extended descriptions of various places, describing the flora, the geography, and the skies, but none of the descriptions seems important to the story.
And the writing feels like rather quotidian 1960s--1970s, universe-spanning, high-concept SF, which is to say that the people and setting are largely props rather than integral parts of the story.
Fundamentally, there is nothing here that I actually care about. This book was going off of Audible+ soon, so I decided to read it now. Perhaps it was that I wasn't ready for it or perhaps it's just not a book for me. But I have no desire to continue this book now or later. From other reviews, there's something here for some audiences, but I'm clearly not a member of any of them. Not recommended.
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Broken Souls
- Eric Carter, Book 2
- De: Stephen Blackmoore
- Narrado por: Rudy Sanda
- Duración: 7 h y 46 m
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Sister murdered, best friend dead, married to the patron saint of death, Santa Muerte. Necromancer Eric Carter's return to Los Angeles hasn't gone well, and it's about to get even worse. His link to the Aztec death goddess is changing his powers, changing him, and he's not sure how far it will go. He's starting to question his own sanity, wonder if he's losing his mind. No mean feat for a guy who talks to the dead on a regular basis.
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Unsympathetic Urban Fantasy
- De Douglas Sundseth en 07-06-25
- Broken Souls
- Eric Carter, Book 2
- De: Stephen Blackmoore
- Narrado por: Rudy Sanda
Unsympathetic Urban Fantasy
Revisado: 07-06-25
After the events of the first book in the series, our hero(?) has even more problems in his life. He's borderline stalking his ex, he's "married" to a supernatural power that he doesn't like or respect, and he's haunted by the ghost of his former best friend.
The setting is still basically generic LA, with magic. And the power of the magic seems to be growing exponentially.
We have a couple of new antagonists, who might be working as agents for somebody else or for themselves. There are several supernatural beings with ambiguous motives. And there are new and old allies who only want to kill Carter part of the time.
The plot seems more confusing than the plot of the first novel, and I found myself losing interest at several points during the read. This might have been purely a function of my increasing detachment from the series. The protagonist is written so as to be able to avoid the consequences of his actions trivially, using stickers, a Sharpie, and magic, which reduces much of the plot to the background. The book ends with a big revelation that didn't really make mechanical sense from elements of the story, but which did make thematic sense.
The protagonist seems to be campaigning throughout the book to become even less sympathetic to the reader, stealing whatever is convenient without consideration of his victims and alienating everyone who might be an ally.
After the first book in this series, I was hesitant to continue, because it didn't work especially well for me. After two books, that opinion is reinforced and I won't be reading any further. I don't care to spend any more time with this protagonist or in this world. YMMV.
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Dead Things
- Eric Carter, Book 1
- De: Stephen Blackmoore
- Narrado por: Rudy Sanda
- Duración: 8 h y 45 m
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Necromancer is such an ugly word, but it's a title Eric Carter is stuck with. He sees ghosts, talks to the dead. He's turned it into a lucrative career putting troublesome spirits to rest, sometimes taking on even more dangerous things. For a fee, of course. When he left LA fifteen years ago, he thought he'd never go back. Too many bad memories. Too many people trying to kill him. But now his sister's been brutally murdered and Carter wants to find out why.
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Cannot Tolerate The Narrator
- De Why137 en 01-12-24
- Dead Things
- Eric Carter, Book 1
- De: Stephen Blackmoore
- Narrado por: Rudy Sanda
Horror-Adjacent Urban Fantasy
Revisado: 07-06-25
Eric Carter is a necromancer, not so much in the "Raising Armies of Zombies" sense as in the "Spirit Whisperer" sense. He was run out of Los Angeles fifteen years before this book, and has now been drawn back by the murder of someone formerly close to him.
In this setting, as is common in urban fantasy, many of the characters and creatures of myth are real, but largely unknown to the general public. And wizards walk among normal humans without acknowledgement.
The plot is serviceable, but there's a bit much convenient revelation of plot points whose existence isn't signaled until the point arrives in the story. The setup and payoff of the plot are both fairly strong, and there's definite emotional impact to the ending. The pacing is good, keeping the story moving throughout.
The setting is largely a frame for the story; there's not much that really ties the story down in time or place. The supernatural is overwhelmingly powerful, to include the protagonist.
Which brings me to my biggest problem with this series: normal people are just pawns on a gameboard, never really seeming to make any impact on the story. And the protagonist treats them that way, stealing whenever he wants to and using his magic to avoid any repercussions. This both makes him very unsympathetic and reduces the impact of the series. When most people are just stage dressing, there's not much to anchor the reader to the story.
I know several people who have really liked this series, so maybe it's just me, but I think this is unlikely to become a favorite. It's not better than "OK" for me.
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Blood and Steel
- Tranquility, Book 1
- De: Josh Hayes, Devon C. Ford
- Narrado por: Scott Aiello
- Duración: 12 h y 21 m
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Joel Lander wants nothing more than a fresh start, far from Earth and wars that have left humanity’s birthplace in shambles. Leaving on the second mission to the distant world of Tranquility, Lander and his family plan to build a brand-new life for themselves. Boasted to be everything Earth wasn’t - clean, unsullied, safe - Lander learns upon arrival that Tranquility is anything but. New Independence has gone dark, and it soon becomes clear that he will have to fight a terrifying enemy to save their new home.
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Great start to a new series!
- De LisaKiernan en 06-13-21
- Blood and Steel
- Tranquility, Book 1
- De: Josh Hayes, Devon C. Ford
- Narrado por: Scott Aiello
Decent Mecha SF
Revisado: 07-04-25
After a major-power war, the winning side sends an expedition to reinforce a new colony on an extra-solar planet. When they arrive, it seems that something has happened to the original colonists.
The reinforcing expedition has little in the way of weapons to deal with the newly discovered threat and the captain of the ship delivering them obstructs the colonists at every turn.
One of the two viewpoint characters is a discharged military hero, who takes up the challenge of investigating the situation, and eventually of resolving the problem. His character is well-drawn, with a complex personality and background. Once the story starts, while he is the primary driver of the plot, he doesn't change much. The other viewpoint character, his wife, has less screen time and a less-developed background, but is the more interesting character, with her relationship to the developer of the colony AI and need to overcome more personal challenges.
The setting is a bit sketched in, with the history on Earth more mentioned than explained and the situation on Tranquility left mostly to the combat scenes in the book. The ship that transports the colonists to the new system takes almost three years to arrive, which can't really be sublight (no time compression is mentioned), but also no super-light system is discussed either.
The details of the combat are evocative and well-paced, but there isn't much tactical complexity to the combat scenes that take up the majority of the book. The primary combat is undertaken by what are on the border between powered armor suits and mecha. The colonists have to make do with powered assist suits that have been modified to be field expedient suits. (Think "Bob Semple tank", frankly.) This probably works better than it should, but the suits are definitely at a disadvantage to the few remaining combat suits on Tranquility.
For my taste, at least, there's too much time spent on close combat between combat suits that result from frontal attacks by one side or the other. I'd rather have seen more effort spent on the world, the technology, and tactics than descriptions of blow-by-blow fight scenes.
I suspect this book will work better for other audiences, but for me, it was just OK. I'm not generally a fan of mecha, and while I like MilSF quite a bit, this didn't engage some of the complexities of the books in the genre I like better. If you're a mecha fan, this is done quite well; there are good reasons for the existence of at least the colony powered-assist suits and the conversion mostly makes sense. As it is, I'll read the next book eventually, but I have other priorities now.
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Terra Nova Chronicles: Publisher's Pack
- Terra Nova Chronicles, Book 1-2
- De: Richard Fox, Josh Hayes
- Narrado por: Luke Daniels
- Duración: 14 h y 38 m
- Versión completa
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Chief Katherine “Kit” Carson, of the elite Pathfinder Corps, joins the mission as a last-minute replacement, hoping to put a spotty past behind her and build a new life on a brave new world. The expedition arrives on Terra Nova, expecting to join the first wave of colonists, instead they find abandoned cities and are soon faced with a new, terrifying enemy humanity has never encountered before. This publisher pack includes Terra Nova and Bloodlines.
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Ugh. Characters lack some originality.
- De Nathanael en 09-08-19
- Terra Nova Chronicles: Publisher's Pack
- Terra Nova Chronicles, Book 1-2
- De: Richard Fox, Josh Hayes
- Narrado por: Luke Daniels
Weak MilSF with a few good elements
Revisado: 06-30-25
Book 1, Terra Nova
I've started this review several times, but only after thinking about this for a couple of days am I ready to put down my thoughts. There are things I like, but ultimately, it's not a book that works for me.
Premise: After an interstellar war (the subject of the author's "Ember War" series), a colony ship is sent by wormhole to the Andromeda Galaxy, to a planet that was previously used as a bolthole for a small group of human colonists during the war. When they arrive, the colony is abandoned, except for two young boys and some replicant soldiers that are hunting "Shannon".
The first problem I have with this series is that the colony, by pure chance, went to a system being used as a prison by an alien race. I'm generally willing to forgive setups for books or series, but there are about 1,000,000,000,000 stars in the Andromeda galaxy, a bit more than 100 for every person on Earth. To randomly pick the one that happens to have the big bad imprisoned isn't just unlikely, it's "drop a rock randomly from space and hit the front yard of the bad guy" unlikely.
<spoiler>Then we have the main ship unable to cross the system in less than months, while one (but only one) of their auxiliaries could cross the same distance in hours. This is the excuse for sending only a small squad of elite soldiers to the place where they believe the colonists are. It later becomes clear that they have very robust automated manufacturing capabilities, but using those to give them more capabilities is not an option, for some reason.
The highly capable special forces soldiers, of course, are ambushed, and most of them taken captive, showing no evidence of high capabilities. This leaves the remaining few soldiers to take on a whole planet and rescue their comrades (because apparently, ten against a planet is just not enough of a challenge. With the power of hand-wavium, they succeed, of course. And the evil overlords run away, taking the brother of the new expedition with them.</spoiler>
So, why isn't this a one-star book? The character work for most of the good guys is memorable, with believable military characters and character interactions. And the characters are sympathetic. And when credulity isn't being strained well past the breaking point, the action scenes are done very well.
There is so much in this series that would bother me less if it were not so bombastically unlikely. They're in the Andromeda galaxy to hide, because it's far away. Well, yes, 766 kiloparsecs is indeed far away. But somehow, they're able to reliably hit a single star system (of a trillion) at that distance, and somehow nothing closer would work. The bad guys just happen to be in that system. The brother of the incoming colony governor just happens to be involved in the problem that's happening. And four(?) people are obviously enough to take on the full force of a technologically superior force that controls a planet.
Book 2, Bloodlines
Book two of the Terra Nova series isn't any better than book one was.
We see the same small group of "Pathfinders" again in this book. Since there are only a few Pathfinders in the expedition, that makes sense, though one would hope that the manufacturing capability of the colony ship could have built something other than their one fast ship. Since there has been a large space battle, with huge quantities of wreckage in orbit, one would expect hull metal (of some sort) to be easy to source.
Well, at least they were able to get an FTL drive intact from a wreck, and figure out how to use it in only a few days. Like you do.
Again, we have a tiny group of people against a planet, though at least at the start, it's a planetary bureaucracy. This was seemingly written for laughs, which doesn't really fit in what is mostly a serious story. We get more unlikely coincidences that both create and solve problems for the protagonists. <spoiler>And this time we get Wesley Crusher using an Independence Day computer hack to save the day. Oh, and then there's the teenager who uses a box to bash in the skull of what is described as a competent warrior. Which I totally believed.</spoiler>
At the end, we get the mustache-twirling enemies (who seem to be drawn from the Kryptonian enemies from Superman 2) setting up the next episode in the story. Which I will never read.
Again, there are some really well-done bits of this story, but there just isn't enough for everything to coalesce into a coherent whole.
Shamus Young published an article on "Story Collapse" in his blog some years ago, and it's the mechanism he described that perfectly represents what happened to me. With each improbability dropped onto the pile, it became harder for me to care. In the end, I mostly didn't.
Finally, Luke Daniels did his usual excellent job of reading the story.
Not recommended.
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Broken Truth
- De: Reavis Z. Wortham
- Narrado por: Eric G. Dove
- Duración: 8 h y 59 m
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Special Agent Tucker Snow knows there's big money roaming the fields under the wide Texas sky—and the cattle rustlers committing large-scale thefts on remote ranches know it, too. But when a prominent local rancher dies unexpectedly and his property is quietly sold to an unknown buyer, Tucker suspects there's something more sinister going on in his jurisdiction than the usual steal-and-resell racket. Still raw after the tragic death of his wife and young daughter, the lawman can't bear the thought of more innocent lives destroyed by people whose greed poisons everything around them.
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One of Wortham's Best
- De Douglas Sundseth en 06-30-25
- Broken Truth
- De: Reavis Z. Wortham
- Narrado por: Eric G. Dove
One of Wortham's Best
Revisado: 06-30-25
The story begins with cattle rustling and ends with murder. The path between them is not straight, and the moral of the story is, "Don't threaten the families of the Snow brothers."
Reavis Wortham evokes the atmosphere of southwestern cowboy culture as well as any writer I've read. My uncle was a USDA herd inspector in the Texas panhandle and southeastern New Mexico, and I could hear his voice telling every piece of this story.
The characters are ... characters, and they fit the story well. The Snows are hard-bitten old Texas lawmen and their families have been raised to take care of themselves. The enemies are a bit oversold, but there are reasons for what they're doing, and they use all of their considerable resources in an effort to get out of the situation they find themselves in.
The story is tightly crafted, with no time for a rest, or even a spare breath, from start to finish. I could have done without some of the cultural commentary, but even that was completely consistent with the characters in the story.
I had had a run of weak books in the last few days, and had almost forgotten how refreshing a really good book is.
The best book of the month for me on the last day of the month. Highly recommended.
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When Wizards Follow Fools
- Arcane Ascension, Book 5
- De: Andrew Rowe
- Narrado por: Nick Podehl
- Duración: 19 h y 25 m
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Corin Cadence has been summoned to meet with the Emerald Council, a political summit including the most powerful of all attuned and their closest political allies. His summons came with a dire warning—that war was coming to the nation of Valia. While Valia is no stranger to warfare, the circumstances of this invasion are dire. Valia's visage, Tenjin, remains missing. Many of the nation's leaders were slain during Mizuchi's attack, and others killed or injured through Saffron's machinations. With a critical power vacuum in Valia's leadership, few can be trusted.
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Corin becoming more annoying
- De Wesley en 04-16-25
- When Wizards Follow Fools
- Arcane Ascension, Book 5
- De: Andrew Rowe
- Narrado por: Nick Podehl
Not strong
Revisado: 06-27-25
War is on the horizon and Corin is summoned to a meeting of the Emerald Council.
This series began as an academy fantasy, but that seems to have been left behind without much comment.
We have tower exploration, crafting, politics, and duels, so all of the usual things from previous books. Except the spark that animated the series previously. This feels like a rather rote recapitulation of all the series tropes, but it really didn't engage my attention as much as previous volumes.
This is the weakest book in the series so far, but it's still entertaining. I don't regret my time spent with this book, but this book would not cause me to read the series. I hope the next book will be better, but I'm not as eager to see it as I would have hoped to have been.
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