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Bitter Recoil

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About this listen

 Aging Undersheriff Bill Gastner's vacation is interrupted by the dead body of a young woman, apparently thrown from a moving car. Other murders convince the Undersheriff to lend a hand.©1992 Steven F Havill (P)2001 Books in Motion Crime Fiction Fiction Genre Fiction Mystery Police Procedural Small Town & Rural Suspense Thriller & Suspense Crime

Critic reviews

"Havill delivers an evocative tale of hard lives on the edge of society. His portly detective is a genuine low-key pleasure." ( Publishers Weekly)
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What made the experience of listening to Bitter Recoil the most enjoyable?

I enjoyed the narrator's accents.

What did you like best about this story?

The author seems to develop his main characters so that they're well rounded.

What about Rusty Nelson’s performance did you like?

I was able to recognize who was talking even if I stopped and came back later so didn't have context to determine the speaker. The narrator is very good.

Wonderful accents

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Undersheriff Bill Gastner is recovering from a quadruple heart bypass and has decided to take a camping holiday in the area of New Mexico now served by his ex-sidekick Estelle Rees-Goosmann. Hundreds of miles from home, living in a mobile home and doing some unfamiliar exercise in the guise of hiking around the New Mexico hills, it is no wonder that Gastner soon finds something to distract him from his newly discovered healthy lifestyle. When a young woman is apparently thrown to her death from a moving truck it is not long before Gastner is paired up with his ex-partner and chain smoking his way through 20 hour days in an effort to establish just what happened to the young woman.
Predictably the body count begins to grow and the normally peaceful New Mexico backwater becomes a very dangerous place indeed. The characters are as vividly drawn as ever, with Gastner studiously avoiding looking after himself while spending his time trying to advise his pregnant colleague to slow down and take better care of herself.
This is police procedural at its very best and again the outstanding and highly sympathetic reading delivered by Rusty Nelson gives the audiobook a dimension beyond that of the written word. Some things are just meant to go together and Rusty Nelson and Bill Gastner are two of these. Highly recommended as a stand alone listen or as part of the entertaining Posadas County series of novels by Steven F. Havill. Enjoy!

Bill Gastner's Busmans Holiday

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