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From the creator of the hit HBO series True Detective comes a powerful, gleaming-dark thriller rich with Southern atmosphere. Roy Cady is by his own admission 'a bad man'. With a snow flurry of cancer in his lungs and no one to live for, he's a walking time-bomb of violence. Following a fling with his boss' lover, he's sent on a routine assignment he knows is a death trap. Yet after a smoking spasm of violence, Roy's would-be killers are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.
Jack Wade, a claims adjuster for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company, is one of the best arson investigators around. He's a man who knows fire, who can read the traces it leaves behind like a roadmap. When he's called in to examine an unusual claim, the tracks of the fire tell him that something's wrong. So wrong that he violates his own cardinal rule - "You don't get personal, you don't get emotional. Whatever you do, you don't get involved" - and plunges into the case.
East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, OAPs are getting hoodwinked, children are missing. But word has spread: if you've got a case the police can't or won't touch, Isaiah Quintabe will help you out. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford. But now he needs a client who can pay.
Detective sergeant Denny Malone leads an elite unit to fight gangs, drugs and guns in New York. For 18 years he's been on the front lines, doing whatever it takes to survive in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean. What only a few know is that Denny Malone himself is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash. Now he's caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk a thin line of betrayal, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.
Outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Batman has assaulted Spider-Man. Marilyn Monroe reported the crime and three Elvises witnessed it. It's business as usual for the cops out of Hollywood Station. But while they deal with the costumed crack-heads, prostitutes, purse snatchers, and ordinary lunatics that haunt the boulevards, in the streets behind the lights and crowds, the real Los Angeles simmers, never far from boiling point.
A small-time hood tries to escape the family business in this powerful story of crime and drug abuse in rural America. The town of Sewardville, Kentucky, teeters on the edge of a violent abyss, overrun with methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse. The Slone family controls everything. Patriarch Walt Slone is the town's mayor and head of one of the largest crime syndicates in the eastern United States.
From the creator of the hit HBO series True Detective comes a powerful, gleaming-dark thriller rich with Southern atmosphere. Roy Cady is by his own admission 'a bad man'. With a snow flurry of cancer in his lungs and no one to live for, he's a walking time-bomb of violence. Following a fling with his boss' lover, he's sent on a routine assignment he knows is a death trap. Yet after a smoking spasm of violence, Roy's would-be killers are mostly dead and he is mostly alive.
Jack Wade, a claims adjuster for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company, is one of the best arson investigators around. He's a man who knows fire, who can read the traces it leaves behind like a roadmap. When he's called in to examine an unusual claim, the tracks of the fire tell him that something's wrong. So wrong that he violates his own cardinal rule - "You don't get personal, you don't get emotional. Whatever you do, you don't get involved" - and plunges into the case.
East Long Beach. The LAPD is barely keeping up with the high crime rate. Murders go unsolved, OAPs are getting hoodwinked, children are missing. But word has spread: if you've got a case the police can't or won't touch, Isaiah Quintabe will help you out. They call him IQ. He's a loner and a high school dropout, his unassuming nature disguising a relentless determination and a fierce intelligence. He charges his clients whatever they can afford. But now he needs a client who can pay.
Detective sergeant Denny Malone leads an elite unit to fight gangs, drugs and guns in New York. For 18 years he's been on the front lines, doing whatever it takes to survive in a city built by ambition and corruption, where no one is clean. What only a few know is that Denny Malone himself is dirty: he and his partners have stolen millions of dollars in drugs and cash. Now he's caught in a trap and being squeezed by the Feds, and he must walk a thin line of betrayal, while the city teeters on the brink of a racial conflagration that could destroy them all.
Outside Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Batman has assaulted Spider-Man. Marilyn Monroe reported the crime and three Elvises witnessed it. It's business as usual for the cops out of Hollywood Station. But while they deal with the costumed crack-heads, prostitutes, purse snatchers, and ordinary lunatics that haunt the boulevards, in the streets behind the lights and crowds, the real Los Angeles simmers, never far from boiling point.
A small-time hood tries to escape the family business in this powerful story of crime and drug abuse in rural America. The town of Sewardville, Kentucky, teeters on the edge of a violent abyss, overrun with methamphetamine and prescription drug abuse. The Slone family controls everything. Patriarch Walt Slone is the town's mayor and head of one of the largest crime syndicates in the eastern United States.
Japan 1951. After spending the last three years in solitary confinement for the murder of his mentor, Nicholai Hel is offered the chance of freedom - but at a price. Overseen by his American spymaster and the beautiful and mysterious Solange, he must travel to China and assassinate the Soviet Union's commissioner. In a landscape primed for war this is a suicide mission he has no choice but to accept. From the glittering corruption of Beijing to the darkest shadows of the Vietnam jungle, his mission will sweep him through a world of chaos, violence and betrayal.
For 11 years the clock has been ticking for Russell Gaines while he's sat in Parchman Penitentiary in the Mississippi Delta. His time now up, and believing his debt has been paid, he returns home only to discover that revenge lives and breathes all around.
Dave Robicheaux has been warned that he's on somebody's hit list, and now the homicide detective is trying to discover just who that is before he ends up dead. Meanwhile he has taken on the murder investigation of a young black girl found dead in the Bayou swamp. Robicheaux uncovers a web of corruption that leads him to a terrifying confrontation with the one horror he fears most of all.
Crows (Community Relations Officers) have it easy handling "the sissie beat": Hollywood's domestic disputes, over-excited paparazzi, and chronic complainers. At least, that's the way it seems. But in Hollywood - where Mickey Mouse is a crack addict and Marilyn Monroe is a man - things are rarely what they seem.
Joe Coughlin is 19 when he meets Emma Gould. A small-time thief in 1920s Boston, he is told to cuff her while his accomplices raid the casino she works for. But Joe falls in love with Emma - and his life changes forever.
That meeting is the beginning of Joe's journey to becoming one of the nation's most feared and respected gangsters. It is a journey beset by violence, double-crossing, drama, and pain. And it is a journey into the soul of prohibition-era America....
It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn't rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land. Following years of catastrophic hurricanes, the Gulf Coast - stretching from the Florida panhandle to the western Louisiana border - has been brought to its knees. The region is so punished and depleted that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline.
Sheriff Colt Harper lives by his own moral code. His relentless crusade against drug crimes in his rural Mississippi county infuriates a Memphis mobster who sends Hack, his cold-blooded assassin, to stop him. ATF Special Agent Molly McDonough, looking to save her troubled career, follows Hack's trail of corpses to Harper's turf. The fates of Harper, McDonough, and Hack collide in a bloody, brutal showdown for justice, redemption, and survival that can only be fought outside the law.
When disgraced spy Solomon Vine's friend and rival Gabriel Wilde vanishes without trace, it's only Vine who might be able to discover what has happened to him. A single missing file holds the key. That, too, is gone. But its contents, Vine is told, are incendiary. There were few Wilde could trust. And being one of them appears to have fatal consequences. But as Vine's off-the-books investigation begins to reveal the shocking truth, he realizes there's much more at stake than one man's life.
In death she looks 35, but Missy Moonbeam, a.k.a. Thelma Bernbaum, is only 22 when the cops of Rampart Division find her flattened on the sidewalk. A Nebraska farm girl, Missy came to Los Angeles to act, and died not long after her dream did. The detectives assume that her pimp threw her off a roof - but they couldn’t be more wrong. Missy had a trick at Caltech whose name draws the Rampart detectives into a bizarre conspiracy.
In 1934, 16-year-old Weldon Avery Holland confronts the notorious outlaws Bonnie and Clyde, resulting with Weldon firing a gun, unsure whether it hit its mark. Ten years later Second Lieutenant Weldon Holland barely survives the Battle of the Bulge, in the process saving the lives of Hershel Pine and a young prisoner of war, Rosita Lowenstein - a woman who holds the same romantic power over him as the beautiful Bonnie Parker.
Bob Saginowski finds himself at the centre of a robbery gone awry and entwined in an investigation that digs deep into the neighborhood's past where friends, families, and foes all work together to make a living - no matter the cost.
A compelling thriller introducing a driven young detective trying to prove herself in the LAPD. Renée Ballard works the night shift in Hollywood, beginning many investigations but finishing none as each morning she turns her cases over to day shift detectives. A once up-and-coming detective, she's been given this beat as punishment after filing a sexual harassment complaint against a supervisor.
Or not. But, really, what choice does he have?
So, he's off to a compound in the middle of a desert that's been designed by Huertero's number-two man to look like the Arabian fort in his favorite movie, Beau Jeste. ("The Santa Fe thing had been done to death.") Kearney's surprised when he meets Bobby Z's old flame, Elizabeth, who was never mentioned in his training, and the son she claims belongs to him. It's a short vacation by the pool before Kearney's on the run from drug lords, bikers, Indians, and cops...and the kid's along for the ride. Some of the pursuers want Bobby Z, and some want the considerably less legendary Tim K. Whether he pulls it off, whether he can keep the kid and the girl and his life, makes for a hilarious, fast-paced, and truly touching novel.
"Winslow juggles black humor, excellent dialog, and numerous plot twists with the ease of an accomplished veteran." (Library Journal)
"Darrell Larson is absolutely terrific....Larson's portrayal of drug world characters is full of sarcasm, wit and clever humor." (AudioFile)
"For all the nasty stuff that Mr. Winslow throws at Bobby/Tim, he maintains the virtue of a comic-book superhero...playing an exciting game of adventure that is good, clean, mindless fun." (The New York Times Book Review)
This was potentially an excellent read. The story is interesting, the author has form. Unfortunately, the book has been abridged so far that it reads like a screenplay and jumps all over the place.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful
Having thoroughly enjoyed several of Don Winslow's other audiobooks, I figured I would give the The Death and Life of Bobby Z a shot. I did realize I was buying and abridged version of the book; what I did not realize is what an injustice the abridgement does to the story. Rather than the detailed and well-spun tales of previous Winslow books I listened to, this one served up little more than chopped up scenes with varying degrees of connectivity.
I was left wishing that Audible has a full version I could purchase, instead. No such luck. I am thankful (and I am certain Winslow would be as well) that this was not my first purchase of one of this author's books because, if it were, I doubt that I would have ever sought out another. To make matters worse, the narration did absolutely nothing to bring any value to the time I invested in listening to this version of The Death and Life of Bobby Z.
My recommendation; do not waste your time, credit, money on an abridged version . . . at least not this particular book. I'll chalk it up to being a lesson learned. That being said, I would not let this abridged version taint my enjoyment of Winslow's other books.
I hope you find this review helpful in making your reading and listening choices easier.
2 of 2 people found this review helpful
This was the right listen at the right time, lively, very well written and with a humorous, lighthearted flair interwoven with the action and mystery.
The book is short, but a great introduction to what I believe will be a new favorite author and narrator.
A delightful and creative short story, long on unlikely good fortune, short on realism but who cares. It really shows Mr. Winslow’s virtuosity against ‘Power of the Dog’ and other of his deep novels, all of which are a pleasure to read.
...from Don Winslow. Compare to his the latest and the best book "The Cartel ", it's a lighter reading. However, it doesn't lack Don Winslow writing mastery. The plot is a little bit predictable, but I have enjoyed it very much. The best narrator of Don Winslow's books is definitely Ray Porter. I understand the theme of the "Z" novel is situated in the surfing community and that's why Don chose the younger narrator. Overall the book is a good reading.
This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?
The story seems pretty good, but I bought this without realizing it's abridged, which I hate. My bad.
What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?
A different narrator would've been great. This guy is horrid.
What was one of the most memorable moments of The Death and Life of Bobby Z?
Where Bobby and the Kid take on all of the guys at the split rock.
What didn’t you like about Darrell Larson’s performance?
He was just bad. Poor reading, errors throughout, no emotion. He didn't bring anything to the story, but he took a ton away from it. Never will order a book narrated by him again.
What character would you cut from The Death and Life of Bobby Z?
Darrell Larson.
The story is as painfully predictable as a tv movie. The style is what I call present tense pitch; the sort of thing you would expect a producer to narrate to a tv movie executive. The characters are unbelievable and stereotypical. The main character is a three time loser who also happens to be a US Marine hero. Those skills learned in the Corps sure help him subdue the bad guys, who are also predictable and stereotypical. The narration is good, though. And it is brief. The problem is that this book attempts to be so hip that it forgets it has a story, some characters, and an atmosphere to provide.
0 of 4 people found this review helpful