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Countdown

The Sunday Times bestselling spy thriller

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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

An undercover CIA officer has seven days to save her country from the world's most dangerous double-agent.

The CIA's highly classified Special Activities Division is in the business of tracking people down and keeping secrets hidden. Then a botched field operation reveals some dark dealings between an officer's superiors and an informant, dealings she's not supposed to know about. And a plot that could kill thousands of Americans. Including her husband and daughter.

Knowing that her leadership is corrupt to the core, intelligence officer Amy Cornwall is forced to give up her identity and to work from the shadows. But it's not easy staying hidden when your enemies are elite intelligence operatives.

Will she get the truth out into the light before losing her identity, her history, her family?

The countdown has already begun.

© James Patterson 2023 (P) Penguin Audio 2023

 Crime Thrillers Genre Fiction Military Mystery Suspense Thriller & Suspense War & Military Espionage Fiction

Critic reviews

A writer with an unusual skill at thriller plotting
No one gets this big without amazing natural storytelling talent - which is what Jim has, in spades (Lee Child)
The master storyteller of our times (Hillary Rodham Clinton)
It's no mystery why James Patterson is the world's most popular thriller writer . . . Simply put: nobody does it better (Jeffrey Deaver)
Patterson boils a scene down to the single, telling detail, the element that defines a character or moves a plot along. It's what fires off the movie projector in the reader's mind (Michael Connelly)
James Patterson is The Boss. End of. (Ian Rankin)
All stars
Most relevant
I loved everything about this book! The detail is great. I can’t wait for the next one!

Great storyline

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Another great, heart pounding book featuring Amy Cornwall. The story is thrilling with twists you’ll never see coming. However as a Brit, the accents of the narrator are truly, truly awful.

Great listen / horrible accents

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Patterson used to be a good writer. This is awful. It seems to have been written by a 12 year old with no sense of irony. Totally predictable. Why is he still doing it? Particularly with a co writer. Brit characters are called Jeremy Windsor and Perkins Gloucester with one called Horace pronounced Horus. Even the main character is named after a place in the Uk. Amy Cornwall, pronounced Corn-Wall. The reader Ellen Archer is even worse. Her British accents are cod, upper class 1940s BBCi and her non Brits are all the same, Saudi, Chechen, whatever. With inexplicable lapses into Irish accents from time to time. In all a complete waste of a credit.

Embarrassingly bad

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Character is supposed to be ex SAS but talks like some cheap Jayne Austin knockoff. It’s like the English language was learned from a 90’s satirical comedy. Nobody talks the way any of these characters talk 😅 🤦‍♂️everyone’s either posher than the royal family or a cockney

Similar with the military terms and references.

It just feels lazy and poorly researched. Unfortunately lives up to the cliché of Americans being ignorant to anything not “merica”.

Choice of narrator is a let down as on top of terrible choice of British language from the author they can’t do accents.

Story line is OK though.

Did you actually do any research on England?

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