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  • Tanner's Twelve Swingers

  • By: Lawrence Block
  • Narrated by: Theo Holland
  • Length: 5 hrs and 5 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (8 ratings)
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Tanner's Twelve Swingers

By: Lawrence Block
Narrated by: Theo Holland
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Summary

Presenting Evan Tanner - the first series character created by Lawrence Block, best-selling author of A Walk Among the Tombstones...

Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge. And, most importantly, time to do his dreaming while he's wide awake.

Karlis, Tanner's comrade in the Latvian Army in Exile, is pining for his true love, a gymnast who can't get out of the Soviet Union. So Tanner sneaks through a hole in the Iron Curtain, meets the child he unwittingly fathered on an earlier trip to Macedonia, smuggles a dissident intellectual out of Yugoslavia, adds to his retinue a six-year-old Lithuanian girl, who'd be the rightful heir to the Lithuanian throne if there ever were one, and winds up not with one Latvian gymnast but with a whole company of them. (Collect them all! Win valuable prizes!)

And he does all this without a passport. Oh, he had one, but he gave it away...

©2016 Lawrence Block (P)2017 Lawrence Block

What listeners say about Tanner's Twelve Swingers

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

EVAN TANNER STRIKES AGAIN!

This is the third Evan Tanner - the unlikely hero, traveller and spy - in the series and another well-read and utterly unlikely story. Once again Lawrence Block shows a terrific grasp of European history which he interweaves with Evan's calm but ever increasingly dangerous forays into countries that wouldn't welcome him if they knew he was there. The humour, sarcasm and plot twists are highly entertaining and just another example of Block's repertoire. I would definitely read them in order so thst you can follow some of the references. I can't wait to pick up the next one!

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another improbably entertaining Tanner adventure

Seen through the lens of the last three decades of political upheaval, this Tanner story seems almost prescient, but this does not detract from the entertainment value. it really pays to have listened to the preceding books in the series, so sticking to the order is recommended. Love how, through innumerable improbable plot twists, everything comes together in the end!

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Fun, frantic, unlikely, unbelievable, enjoyable

The third Evan Tanner book is similar in vein to the first couple - The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep and The Canceled Czech. We have the same landscape - late 60s Eastern Europe, the same cast of eccentric characters Tanner encounters on his road trip and what is an improbable and unlikely mission at the start, becoming more bizarre and impossible as the book progresses, before Block pulls it off spectacularly at the end.

Fun and, frantic, unlikely and unbelievable, enjoyable and entertaining.

Events, scenes and outcomes which in anyone's else's hands would have you saying... yeah, right and FFS, I was savouring and anticipating just to see how exactly Block gets Tanner out of his latest scrape.

Ostensibly, Tanner goes to Europe to visit his unseen offspring and to attempt the rescue of a Latvian gymnast - all in the name of love. What we get is ....... dissident smuggling, Chinese secrets, a Romanian child princess, a suppressed manuscript, a gymnastics team, state of the art Russian fighter planes, a defecting pilot and an unlikely unofficial child adoption. All in a few day's work for our special agent.

As per usual there are some prescient observations regarding nationalism and the state of nations in respect of the Soviet Union and its then satellite states.

Roll on book 4 and a new landscape - Asia.

4 from 5

Read - (listened to) February, 2020
Published - 1967
Page count - 216 (5 hrs 5 mins)
Source - Audible download code from one of the author's assistants
Format - Audible

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Evan Tanner!

Evan is once again on his improbable and entertaining adventures. And no, it's not about that kind of swinging. Good stuff!

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