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Starter Villain

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About this listen

Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.

Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.

©2023 John Scalzi (P)2023 Audible, Inc. Adventure Fantasy Science Fiction Superhero Funny Feel-Good Witty
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No real complaints, it's fun, and it builds to a very satisfying climax. The premise makes it hard to avoid comparisons with the rather better Hench by Natalie Walschots, however - Scalzi's best stories feel fresher than this. I couldn't help feeling it was a bit self-indulgent, too. Scalzi delights in trolling the blue-tick anti-woke mob who suck up to corporate slimeballs like Elon Musk, but he's done it better with other stories, like the excellent Kaiju Preservation Society. Here, it felt a bit obvious. Performance-wise, it's the same as every Will Wheaton reading. I'm happy to listen to him, he does a decent job and is a good reader for this kind of stuff but the character differentiation is iffy and accents are a crapshoot.

Lots of fun, but not Scalzi's best

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enjoyed the humor in this. the story was good and characters interesting. only minor flaws was while the narrator was decent there was little to no difference in "voices" of different characters. pace made this worse as he talks like he's in a coffee buzz. May wish to set to 0.90 on speed makes it easier to understand.

funny!

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yes, get this book and enjoye it.
it's light, funny and have cat's.
seriously get it.

That was Fun.

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Scalzi’s Covid novels are turning into some of my favourites. If you recently read KPS you’ll love this. Equally off the wall and, as always, fantastically narrated by the Will Wheaton.

Hope to see more of JS’s work soon!

Classic Scalzi

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A superb super villain parody. Loved every minute of it. Will Wheaton does a great narration job too. His sarcasm shines through

Gloriously crackers

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