Welcome to Brian’s Book Blog’s weekly New and Notable Post for the Week of June 30th. We share the 10 books from this week that caught our eye featuring mostly Post-Apocalyptic, Science Fiction, and Thrillers with a few others thrown in. Enjoy!
Comment below on any I missed or what you’re excited about!
Authors, narrators, producers, and publishers — any of the books featured here are prime candidates for review.
If you see yourself featured here, I would love to review your audiobook!
Submit Your Review Here
Book covers and bolded titles may have affiliate links to Amazon (where you can buy the Audible version).
Clicking these helps support this site, so thank you if you do.
New to Audible or Audiobooks in general? Welcome!
Get 2 free books (instead of just 1!) when you sign up using this link:
Try Audible and Get Two Free Audiobooks
The Fifth Column by Bobby Akart
Narrated by Sean Runnette
Enemy forces gather under the veil of darkness – mobilizing to strike a fledgling nation.
Will this clandestine Fifth Column achieve its acts of sabotage?
Remember, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Once again, political suspense collides with postapocalyptic thriller fiction as critically acclaimed author Bobby Akart (The Lone Star series, The Blackout series, The Pandemic series, The Boston Brahmin series, and the Prepping for Tomorrow series) intertwines historical fact with plausible fiction in The Lone Star series.
The Republic of Texas has focused its efforts on the survival of its citizens to the detriment of those who seek to cross their borders. When an unforeseen enemy penetrates its defenses, the unthinkable happens, causing the nation to face its greatest test.
Can Texas come together to protect its own? Will the death of one of its own cause turmoil among the ranks? Will the advancing Fifth Column receive assistance from an unlikely source? The Lone Star series continues with Fifth Column.
The Paradise Key by Nick Thacker
Narrated by Mike Vendetti
Paradisum is a science-based theme park.
At least, that’s what everyone thinks.
But there seems to be something sinister going on beneath the surface.
OceanTech Paradisum is the cutting-edge theme park from OceanTech, and they are hoping to capitalize on the growing trend of education-based vacation destinations.
The park’s CEO, Adrian Crawford, has spent his entire professional life working toward this goal, and he is excited to show it to the world.
Harvey Bennett and his team at the Civilian Special Operations are sent to Paradisum to investigate the security protocols at the new park.
But what they find there terrifies them….
From USA Today best-selling author Nick Thacker, The Paradise Key is the latest in the groundbreaking and genre-bending Harvey Bennett Thrillers series!
The Paradise Key is part of a longer series but was written to be enjoyed as a stand-alone novel.
Drop by Drop by Morgan Llywelyn
Narrated by Hillary Huber
From Morgan Llywelyn, the best-selling author of Lion of Ireland and the Irish Century series, comes Drop by Drop, her first near-future science-fiction thriller where technology fails and a small town struggles to survive global catastrophe.
In this first book in the Step by Step trilogy, global catastrophe occurs as all plastic mysteriously liquefies. All the small components making many technologies possible – navigation systems, communications, medical equipment – fail.
In Sycamore River, citizens find their lives disrupted as everything they’ve depended on melts around them, with sometimes fatal results. All they can rely upon is themselves.
And this is only the beginning….
Awakened by James S. Murray & Darren Wearmouth
Narrated by James S. Murray
After years of waiting, New York’s newest subway line is finally ready, an express train that connects the city with the burgeoning communities across the Hudson River. The shining jewel of this state-of-the-art line is a breathtaking visitors’ pavilion beneath the river. Major dignitaries, including New York City’s Mayor and the President of the United States, are in attendance for the inaugural run, as the first train slowly pulls in.
Under the station’s bright ceiling lights, the shiny silver cars gleam. But as the train comes closer into view, a far different scene becomes visible.
All the train’s cars are empty.
All the cars’ interiors are drenched in blood.
As chaos descends, all those in the pavilion scramble to get out. But the horror is only beginning. High levels of deadly methane fill the tunnels. The structure begins to flood. For those who don’t drown, choke or spark an explosion, another terrifying danger awaits – the thing that killed all those people on the train. It’s out there…and it’s coming.
There’s something living beneath New York City, and it’s not happy we’ve woken it up.
Primordia by Greig Beck
Narrated by Sean Mangan
A journey into the deepest, darkest jungles of the Venezuelan Amazon…and a primeval place and time that mankind was never meant to exist in.
Ben Cartwright, former soldier, home to mourn the loss of his father, stumbles upon cryptic letters from the past between author Arthur Conan Doyle and his great-great-grandfather who vanished while exploring the Amazon jungle in 1908.
Amazingly, these letters lead Ben to believe that his ancestor’s expedition was the basis for Doyle’s fantastical tale of a lost world inhabited by long-extinct creatures. As Ben digs some more, he finds clues to the whereabouts of a lost notebook that might contain a map to a place that is home to creatures that would rewrite everything known about history, biology and evolution. But other parties now know about the notebook and will do anything to obtain it. For Ben and his friends, it becomes a race against time and against ruthless rivals.
In the remotest corners of the Venezuela, along winding river trails known only to lost tribes, and through near impenetrable jungle, Ben and his novice team find a forbidden place more terrifying and dangerous than anything they could ever have imagined.
The Secret of the Stones by Ernest Dempsey
Narrated by John Glouchevitch
They tried to kill him to cover up an ancient secret. Now Sean Wyatt is plunged head first into a race against time to save his best friend and the lives of billions.
A 4,000-year-old mystery lurks in the hills of Georgia. While investigating a strange series of ancient symbols, an archaeologist vanishes, and a professor he entrusted with the secret is murdered. Former government agent Sean Wyatt learns of his friend’s disappearance and the murder. Now he must unravel the clues to the ancient mystery that holds incredible power.
To save his friend, Sean will have to fight off highly trained mercenaries in hand to hand combat, violent shootouts, and high speed car chases through the Blue Ridge Mountains. And in the end, what he learns will change the history books as we know them.
Rebel Bound by Shauna E. Black
Narrated by Courtney Parker
Caelin is a survivor. It’s been 11 years since a nuclear disaster drove much of the population underground. Caelin and her young sister Mardy were left topside, and Caelin uses salvage to trade for shelter until she gets stabbed, and a handsome stranger named Jate must save her life.
Jate brings the sisters to rebel turf where plans are being hatched to conquer the Undercity. The rebels preach good life for the masses, and both Caelin and Mardy are hooked on the dream. But as Caelin is drawn deeper into the rebel’s inner circle, passion ignites between Caelin and Jate, and he suddenly seems determined to push her away.
Then she discovers the harsh price of loyalty. The rebel’s dream becomes a nightmare that puts her sister on a dangerous mission to the Undercity. Caelin must determine who to trust before Mardy and the population of the Undercity are wiped out.
The Cabin at the End of the World: A Novel by Paul Tremblay
Narrated by Amy Landon
The Bram Stoker award-winning author of A Head Full of Ghosts adds an inventive twist to the home invasion horror story in a heart-palpitating novel of psychological suspense that recalls Stephen King’s Misery, Ruth Ware’s In a Dark, Dark Wood, and Jack Ketchum’s cult hit The Girl Next Door.
Seven-year-old Wen and her parents, Eric and Andrew, are vacationing at a remote cabin on a quiet New Hampshire lake. Their closest neighbors are more than two miles in either direction along a rutted dirt road.
One afternoon, as Wen catches grasshoppers in the front yard, a stranger unexpectedly appears in the driveway. Leonard is the largest man Wen has ever seen but he is young, friendly, and he wins her over almost instantly. Leonard and Wen talk and play until Leonard abruptly apologizes and tells Wen, “None of what’s going to happen is your fault”. Three more strangers then arrive at the cabin carrying unidentifiable, menacing objects. As Wen sprints inside to warn her parents, Leonard calls out: “Your dads won’t want to let us in, Wen. But they have to. We need your help to save the world.”
Thus begins an unbearably tense, gripping tale of paranoia, sacrifice, apocalypse, and survival that escalates to a shattering conclusion, one in which the fate of a loving family and quite possibly all of humanity are entwined. The Cabin at the End of the World is a masterpiece of terror and suspense from the fantastically fertile imagination of Paul Tremblay.
The Darkest Time of Night by Jeremy Finley
Narrated by Suzanne Toren
Anchor and investigative journalist for WSMV-TV in Nashville, Jeremy Finley’s debut thriller explores what happens to people’s lives when our world intersects with the unexplainable.
“The lights took him.”
When the seven-year-old grandson of a US senator vanishes in the woods behind his home, the only witness is his older brother, who whispers, “The lights took him,” and then never speaks again. As the FBI and National Guard launch a massive search, the boys’ grandmother Lynn Roseworth fears only she knows the truth. But coming forward would ruin her family and her husband’s political career.
In the late 1960s, before she became the quiet wife of a politician, Lynn was a secretary in the astronomy department at the University of Illinois. It was there where she began taking mysterious messages for one of the professors, messages from people desperate to find their missing loved ones who vanished into beams of light.
Determined to find her beloved grandson and expose the truth, she must return to the work she once abandoned to unravel the existence of a place long forgotten by the world. It is there, buried deep beneath the bitter snow and the absent memories of its inhabitants, where her grandson may finally be found. But there are forces that wish to silence her. And Lynn will find how far they will go to stop her and how the truth about her own forgotten childhood could reveal the greatest mystery of all time.
The Darkest Time of Night is fast-paced debut full of suspense and government cover-ups, perfect for thriller and supernatural fans alike.
A SIBA Okra Pick for June.
Into the Mist by Lee Murray
Narrated by Greg Douras
When NZDF Sergeant Taine McKenna and his squad are tasked with escorting a bunch of civilian contractors into Te Urewera National Park, it seems a strange job for the army.
Militant Tuhoe separatists are active in the area, and with its cloying mist and steep ravines, the forest is a treacherous place in winter.
- Muted (Silence Jones #10 by Erik Carter (Narrated by Gary Bennett) - December 4, 2023
- New and Notable Audiobook Releases for the Week of December 3rd on Brian’s Book Blog - December 3, 2023
- Disease X by N.J. Croft (Narrated by Joshua Saxon) - December 1, 2023
