Welcome to Brian’s Book Blog’s weekly New and Notable Audiobooks Post for the Week of June 11th.
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Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler
Narrated by Natalie Naudus, Lori Prince
OrangeSky Audio
See my review of Home Field Advantage here.
$7.49 Whispersync Deal with Kindle Purchase
Check out my reviews of other titles written by Dahlia Adler
Check out my reviews of other titles Narrated by Natalie Naudus, Lori Prince
Amber McCloud’s dream is to become cheer captain at the end of the year, but it’s an extra-tall order to be joyful and spirited when the quarterback of your team has been killed in a car accident. For both the team and the squad, watching Robbie get replaced by newcomer Jack Walsh is brutal. And when it turns out Jack is actually short for Jaclyn, all hell breaks loose.
The players refuse to be led by a girl, the cheerleaders are mad about the changes to their traditions, and the fact that Robbie’s been not only replaced but outshined by a QB who wears a sports bra has more than a few Atherton Alligators in a rage. Amber tries for some semblance of unity, but it quickly becomes clear that she’s only got a future on the squad and with her friends if she helps them take Jack down.
Just one problem: Amber and Jack are falling for each other, and if Amber can’t stand up for Jack and figure out how to get everyone to fall in line, her dream may come at the cost of her heart.
Dahlia Adler’s Home Field Advantage is a sparkling romance about fighting for what—or who—you truly want.
Aeon Rising by Matthew Mather
Narrated by Ray Porter
Recorded Books
Review coming soon
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Check out my reviews of other titles Narrated by Ray Porter
An apocalyptic supernova flashes over the South Pole. A mysterious mission sent deep into the Amazon. The story of one family’s struggle to reunite…
Max Carver, a down-on-his-luck truck driver and Army vet, joins a rescue mission into Brazil. The target is a utopian tech village, the Colony, hidden in the rainforest and run by a charismatic genius. Max’s pregnant wife, Talisha Carver, is the NSA analyst who intercepted encrypted Colony messages signaling a mysterious impending event.
Dr. Xin Rou is a Chinese researcher working at the IceCube neutrino experiment at the South Pole. On lucky days a single flash might signal the passage of a ghostly interstellar particle. Suddenly, IceCube’s entire array lights up. A million detectors at once. Which is impossible. The Antarctic sky is clear and calm—but she is already running for the door.
Because the world is about to end. But the mystery just begins…
So Happy for You by Celia Laskey
Narrated by Kristen Sieh
Harlequin Audio
See my review of So Happy For You here
Check out my reviews of other titles written by Celia Laskey
Check out my reviews of other titles Narrated by Kristen Sieh
A wedding weekend spirals out of control in this bold, electrifying, hilarious novel about the complexities of female friendship.
Robin and Ellie have been best friends since childhood. When Robin came out, Ellie was there for her. When Ellie’s father died, Robin had her back. But when Ellie asks Robin to be her maid of honor, she is reluctant. A queer academic, Robin is dubious of the elaborate wedding rituals now sweeping the nation, which go far beyond champagne toasts and a bouquet toss. But loyalty wins out, and Robin accepts.
Yet, as the wedding weekend approaches, a series of ominous occurrences lead Robin to second-guess her decision. It seems that everyone in the bridal party is out to get her. Perhaps even Ellie herself.
Manically entertaining, viciously funny, and eerily campy, So Happy for You is the ultimate send-up to our collective obsession with the wedding industrial complex and a riveting, unexpectedly poignant depiction of friendship in all its messy glory.
Aurora by David Koepp
Narrated by Rupert Friend
HarperAudio
Check out my reviews of other titles written by David Koepp
From the author of Cold Storage comes a riveting, eerily plausible thriller, told with the menace and flair of Under the Dome or Project Hail Mary, in which a worldwide cataclysm plays out in the lives of one complicated midwestern family.
In Aurora, Illinois, Aubrey Wheeler is just trying to get by after her semi-criminal ex-husband split, leaving behind his unruly teenage son.
Then the lights go out—not just in Aurora but across the globe. A solar storm has knocked out power almost everywhere. Suddenly, all problems are local, very local, and Aubrey must assume the mantle of fierce protector of her suburban neighborhood.
Across the country lives Aubrey’s estranged brother, Thom. A fantastically wealthy, neurotically over-prepared Silicon Valley CEO, he plans to ride out the crisis in a gilded desert bunker he built for maximum comfort and security.
But the complicated history between the siblings is far from over, and what feels like the end of the world is just the beginning of several long-overdue reckonings—which not everyone will survive….
Aurora is suspenseful storytelling—both large scale and small—at its finest.
The Gatekeeper by James Byrne
Narrated by John Keating
Macmillan Audio
$7.49 Whispersync Deal with Kindle Purchase
James Byrne’s The Gatekeeper introduces Dez Limerick in the most anticipated new thriller in years.
A highly trained team of mercenaries launches a well-planned, coordinated attack on a well-guarded military contractor—but they didn’t count on one thing: the right man being in the wrong place at the right time.
Desmond Aloysius Limerick (“Dez” to all) is a retired mercenary, and enthusiastic amateur musician, currently in Southern California, enjoying the sun and sitting in on the occasional gig, when the hotel he’s at falls under attack. A skilled team attempts to kidnap the chief legal counsel of Triton Expeditors, a major military contractor—in fact, Petra Alexandris is the daughter of the CEO—but their meticulously planned, seamlessly executed scheme runs into the figurative “spanner-in-the-works,” Dez himself.
After foiling the attack, and with nothing better to do, Dez agrees to help Alexandris with another problem she’s having—someone has embezzled more than a billion dollars from her company and left very few tracks behind. But Dez is a gatekeeper—one who opens doors and keeps them open—and this is just a door of another kind. And the door he opens leads to a dangerous conspiracy involving media manipulation, militias, an armed coup, and an attempt to fracture the United States itself. There’s only one obstacle between the conspirators and success—and that is Dez, The Gatekeeper.
A Macmillan Audio production from Minotaur Books.
Counterfeit by Kirstin Chen
Narrated by Catherine Ho
HarperAudio
For fans of Hustlers and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, the story of two Asian American women who band together to grow a counterfeit handbag scheme into a global enterprise—an incisive and glittering blend of fashion, crime, and friendship from the author of Bury What We Cannot Take and Soy Sauce for Beginners.
Money can’t buy happiness…but it can buy a decent fake.
Ava Wong has always played it safe. As a strait-laced, rule-abiding Chinese American lawyer with a successful surgeon as a husband, a young son, and a beautiful home—she’s built the perfect life. But beneath this façade, Ava’s world is crumbling: her marriage is falling apart, her expensive law degree hasn’t been used in years, and her toddler’s tantrums are pushing her to the breaking point.
Enter Winnie Fang, Ava’s enigmatic college roommate from Mainland China, who abruptly dropped out under mysterious circumstances. Now, 20 years later, Winnie is looking to reconnect with her old friend. But the shy, awkward girl Ava once knew has been replaced with a confident woman of the world, dripping in luxury goods, including a coveted Birkin in classic orange. The secret to her success? Winnie has developed an ingenious counterfeit scheme that involves importing near-exact replicas of luxury handbags and now she needs someone with a US passport to help manage her business—someone who’d never be suspected of wrongdoing, someone like Ava. But when their spectacular success is threatened and Winnie vanishes once again, Ava is left to face the consequences.
Swift, surprising, and sharply comic, Counterfeit is a stylish and feminist caper with a strong point of view and an axe to grind. Peering behind the curtain of the upscale designer storefronts and the Chinese factories where luxury goods are produced, Kirstin Chen interrogates the myth of the model minority through two unforgettable women determined to demand more from life.
The City Inside by Samit Basu
Narrated by Reena Dutt
Random House Audio
The City Inside, a near-future epic by the internationally celebrated Samit Basu, pulls no punches as it comes for your anxieties about society, government, the environment, and our world at large—yet never loses sight of the hopeful potential of the future.
“They’d known the end times were coming but hadn’t known they’d be multiple choice.”
Joey is a Reality Controller in near future Delhi. Her job is to supervise the multimedia multi-reality livestreams of Indi, one of South Asia’s fastest rising online celebrities—who also happens to be her college ex. Joey’s job gives her considerable culture-power, but she’s too caught up in day-to-day crisis-handling to see this, or to figure out what she wants from her life.
Rudra is a recluse estranged from his wealthy and powerful family who fled to an impoverished immigrant neighborhood where he loses himself in video games and his neighbors’ lives. When his father’s death pulls him back into his family’s orbit, an impulsive job offer from Joey becomes his only escape from the life he never wanted.
But no good deed goes unpunished. As Joey and Rudra become enmeshed in multiple conspiracies, their lives start to spin out of control, complicated by dysfunctional relationships, corporate loyalty, and the never-ending pressures of surveillance capitalism. When a bigger picture begins to unfold around them, they must each decide how to do the right thing in a shadowy world where simply maintaining the status quo feels like an accomplishment. Ultimately, resistance will not—cannot—take the same shape for these two very different people.
Exactly Where You Need to Be by Amelia Diane Coombs
Narrated by Eileen Stevens
Blackstone Publishing
$7.49 Whispersync Deal with Kindle Purchase
Turtles All the Way Down meets Love and Luck in this romantic road trip story about a teen girl’s last chance to have an epic summer with her best friend before everything changes.
Florie’s OCD and her mother’s worrying have kept her from a lot of things, like having an after-school job and getting her driver’s license. And now that she’s graduated high school, while her best friend Kacey is headed off to Portland in the fall, Florie’s taking a parent-sanctioned gap year off before starting college. When the decision was made, Florie was on board, but now she can’t ignore the growing itch to become the person she wants to be and venture outside the quaint, boring Washington town she grew up in.
Winning tickets to see her favorite true crime podcast’s live show in California gives her the opportunity to do just that, if only for a few days. So—unbeknownst to their parents—Kacey and Florie set off on a road trip to San Francisco. The only downside in Florie’s opinion? Sam, Kacey’s older brother and Florie’s forever crush, is their ride. The Samson Hodge, who Florie hasn’t seen since winter break, and who she’d prefer to never see again, if possible. But Florie is willing to put up with Sam if it means one last adventure with her best friend.
Making it to San Francisco and back to Washington without their parents catching on isn’t a given, but one thing is for sure: this trip will change everything.
Tapping into Love by Monica McCallan
Narrated by Lori Prince
Tantor Audio
Review coming soon
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Lucy Parsons wants absolutely nothing to do with the Westmoore family or the maple syrup they produce. When Sierra Westmoore blows back into town after her father’s death and tries to rent a room at Lucy’s family’s bed-and-breakfast, The Maple Inn, Lucy kicks her out on the spot. It doesn’t matter that Sierra hasn’t set foot in Maple Run in fifteen years—the Westmoores are not allowed.
But small towns don’t leave a lot of room to hide, and Sierra and her brother, Drake, have set their sights on improving the town’s opinion of them now that their father is gone.
Lucy doesn’t believe any Westmoore could have good intentions, and although she may have to play nice with Sierra, it doesn’t mean she’s going to like it.
Contains mature themes.
Reclaiming Love by Amanda Radley
Narrated by Amy Putt
Bold Strokes Books
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Sarah Campbell told one tiny white lie.
When her tech-giant employer moves her to a cottage on a small Scottish island to work on a classified, controversial, and potentially world-saving project, Sarah must keep her eco-terrorist mother in the dark to prevent her from disrupting everything. Sarah’s cover story—she’s fallen in love, she and her girlfriend are escaping the bustle of the city, she couldn’t be happier….
But Sarah’s better at firewalls than real walls, and when she arrives at the run-down cottage, she quickly discovers she needs help.
Pippa Kent is a widowed, semi-retired structural engineer who’s done with love. She fills all her free time running a handywoman service on the island. When Sarah calls Pippa out for the most basic repairs, Pippa can’t help but wonder—often out loud—how anyone could be so inept at home maintenance.
Then Sarah’s mother suddenly decides to visit and meet her daughter’s wonderful new partner. With little option, Sarah begs Pippa to be her fake girlfriend. Only the more time they spend faking it, the less pretend it feels.
Forever by Kris Bryant
Narrated by Melissa Sternenberg
Bold Strokes Books
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Who doesn’t want to believe in true love?
Ten years ago, Savannah Edwards agreed to be a contestant on the lesbian dating show When Sparks Fly. The last thing she expected was to fall in love and get dumped on national television. When she’s invited to be the next bachelorette for the 10-year anniversary show, she makes up her mind that this time, she’ll show the world that finding true love on television can really happen.
Lauren Lucas breathed life into a show that was on the brink of cancellation. Her charm as the host of When Sparks Fly catapulted it to a nationwide hit. Her own love life is in shambles, but she puts on a dazzling smile and pretends that love isn’t heartbreak waiting to happen.
Every week, Lauren watches Savannah date other women and tries to ignore the spark. When the cameras stop rolling and their attraction becomes impossible to deny, will they take a chance on real-life love and abandon the reality TV fairy tale?
Everybody Needs a Hero by KC Luck
Narrated by Tessa Stavers
Self Published
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Hold on to your heart….
The daughter of an actress superstar, Ashley Landish wants nothing more than to simply run her popular coffee shop on the Venice Beach boardwalk and enjoy the sun and beaches of beautiful Southern California. There is only one thing missing in her life—someone special to take her breath away.
Marine Corporal Bryce Cooper is home on leave after taking care of her father in his last days. Although the Marine Corps is calling, she has a new outlook on life, leaving one last box to check—to tell the woman she knew in college, Ashley Landish, that she loves her.
Award-winning author Drew Andersen’s mission in life is to spread the message of her novel to the world by having it made into a movie. Everything is going perfectly until a last-minute switch gives the lead actress role to Hollywood diva Tess Landish. She’s ready to do whatever she can to have her kicked off the movie—until the chemistry between them sends Drew into a tailspin.
Forty-eight-year-old Tess Landish realizes her illustrious career as an A-list celebrity is starting to fade. When the opportunity comes to take the romantic lead in a film based on a popular novel, she jumps at it only to learn the author of the book doesn’t want her for the role. Tess is determined to change her mind—especially after they meet and sparks fly.
When a powerful earthquake rocks Los Angeles, the four women must find a way to not only work together to save themselves, but also to protect their hearts.
Everybody Needs a Hero is a multi-trope romance with a little adventure sprinkled in for fun.
Training for Love by Amanda Kabak
Narrated by Nicol Zanzarella
Tantor Audio
Review coming soon!
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Charlie Williamson is a life-long jock who’s butch enough to cause plenty of raised eyebrows in gym locker rooms. Since flaming out of college on a wave of drugs, alcohol, and depression, she’s worked the same easy, low-stress job at RRiotWear—a women’s fitness clothing startup in Chicago. Then, with a promotion on the horizon, Charlie’s boss ropes her into leading a beginner’s marathon group in the RRiotWear facilities.
Elizabeth McIntyre runs a boutique tech company. Since graduating from MIT, she’s made herself into the face of women in technology. She has a beautiful apartment she never sees, a string of ex-girlfriends, and a propensity for panic attacks. When her doctor confirms what her best friend has been saying for years—that Elizabeth needs to slow down and make some radical life changes—she signs up for RRiotWear’s marathon program.
Despite everything that points to a not-so-perfect fit, the attraction between Charlie and Elizabeth grows week after week, and mile after mile. But with secrets lingering between them, they might find their relationship stumbles before it can even get to the starting line.
Contains mature themes.
How to Save a Life by Clare Swatman
Narrated by Toby Webster, Georgia Maguire
Boldwood Books
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One night in December, twenty-two year old Ted Green makes his way to Waterloo Bridge determined to end his life. Lonely, despairing and utterly hopeless, it seems the only choice to make.
That same night in December, Marianne Cooper is running away from a party. Having found her boyfriend in a passionate clinch with someone else, Marianne can’t get away fast enough. But as she makes her way along London’s South Bank, a figure catches her eye on top of the bridge.
Then she sees him, a man ready to jump.
When Marianne saves Ted’s life, this night in December becomes one they’ll never forget, but as Ted watches Marianne leave in a black taxi, all he can think is he should have asked her name.
In a story spanning twenty years, join Ted and Marianne as they navigate life’s twists and turns, joys and heartbreaks, while all the time wondering—will fate ever bring them together again… Perfect for fans of Sophie Cousens and Isabelle Broom.
Match Game by Craig Alanson
Narrated by R.C. Bray
Podium Audio
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For years, the ancient alien AI known as Skippy (the Magnificent, don’t forget that part) has been able to do one impossible thing after another. What is his secret? It’s simple: 100 percent Grade-A extreme awesomeness. And also because he had never been faced with an opponent of equal power. Until now.
This time, he might need a little help from a band of filthy monkeys.
The Midcoast by Adam White
Narrated by George Newbern
Random House Audio
It’s spring in the tiny town of Damariscotta, a tourist haven on the coast of Maine known for its oysters and antiques. Andrew, a high school English teacher recently returned to the area, has brought his family to Ed and Steph Thatch’s sprawling riverside estate to attend a reception for the Amherst women’s lacrosse team. Back when they were all teenagers, Andrew never could have predicted that Ed, descended from a long line of lobstermen, or Steph, a decent student until she dropped out to start a family, would ever send a daughter to a place like Amherst. But so the tides have turned, and Andrew’s trying hard to admire, more than envy, the view from Ed’s rolling backyard meadow.
As Andrew wanders through the Thatches’ house, he stumbles upon a file he’s not supposed to see: photos of a torched body in a burned-out sedan. And when a line of state police cruisers crashes the Thatches’ reception an hour later, Andrew and his neighbors finally begin to see the truth behind Ed and Steph’s remarkable rise. Soon the newspapers are running headlines about the Thatches, and Andrew’s poring over his memories, trying to piece together the story of a family he thought he knew.
A propulsive drama that cares as deeply about its characters as it does about the crimes they commit, The Midcoast explores the machinations of privilege, the dark recesses of the American dream, and the lies we tell as we try, at all costs, to protect the ones we love.
The Agent G Omnibus: Volume 1 by C. T. Phipps
Narrated by Jeffrey Kafer
Crossroads Press
See my review of The Agent G Omnibus: Volume 1 here
Check out my reviews of other titles written by C. T. Phipps
Check out my reviews of other titles Narrated by Jeffrey Kafer
From the best-selling author of The Supervillainy Saga.
“Black Technology has made murder a billion-dollar industry.”
The International Refugee Society has 26 cybernetically enhanced “Letters”, and for the right price, they’ll eliminate anyone. They’ve given up their families and their memories for 10 years of service with the promise of a life of luxury awaiting them.
Agent G is one of these “Letters”, but clues to his past are starting to emerge while he’s on a dangerous mission to infiltrate the Society’s most dangerous competitor. In the midst of all the violence, subterfuge, and deceit, he’ll need to keep his wits about him and trust sparingly.
After all, if an organization will kill for money, what would they do to keep the truth hidden?
The Agent G Omnibus contains the first three volumes of the Agent G series (Infiltrator, Saboteur, and Assassin). Follow G as he slowly unravels the truth of his past, the conspiracy behind the International Refugee Society, and his allies. The Agent G series follows the transformation of our present-day world into a terrifying cyberpunk future as man merges with machine.
- No Rules of Engagement by Tracey Richardson (Narrated by Joana Garcia) - September 28, 2023
- Love at First Set by Jennifer Dugan (Narrated Narrated by Lori Prince) - September 26, 2023
- New and Notable Audiobook Releases for the Week of September 23rd on Brian’s Book Blog - September 23, 2023
