Bitter Recoil cover art

Bitter Recoil

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Bitter Recoil

By: Steven F. Havill
Narrated by: Rusty Nelson
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

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

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Heartshot cover art
Kill Monster cover art
Legend of the Dead cover art
Point Blank: Five Dangerous Ground Novellas cover art
The Botanist cover art
Echoes in the Sand cover art
War Against the Mafia cover art
Escape the Breakdown cover art
Ghouls cover art
Savage Grounds cover art
Dawn of Deception cover art
Lone Jack Trail cover art
The Dale Conley Action Thrillers, Books 1-3 cover art
Highwayman cover art
Under the Blade cover art
Regardless of the Consequences cover art

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)
All stars
Most relevant

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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
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

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.