Welcome to Brian’s Book Blog’s weekly New and Notable Post for the Week of June 8th.
Comment below on any I missed or what you’re excited about!
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Darkest Days by Boyd Craven III
Narrated by Kevin Pierce
Wes, finding himself between a rock and a hard place, had to make an impossible decision, one he’s not sure he can forgive himself for. In his journey to always make the right choices, he risks his morals and the safety of those around him. Knowing exactly how he got there and unable to change his decisions, he struggles to keep going day by day.
Lance and Henry weren’t working alone, and as more of the opposition group’s actions are showing them to be as evil and twisted as they first seemed. If that wasn’t enough, Wes is betrayed by a friend.
Not one for letting others remain enslaved, Wes’s group decides to go on the offensive. With time running out, and dark forces moving on his family, he has to become more than a simple moonshiner and occasional poacher. He has to survive what’s to be some of his darkest days and keep his humanity.
With Raider being the only sane one left, he must guide his human like he’s never had to before.
The Shallows by Matt Goldman
Narrated by Macleod Andrews
In the words of Lee Child on Gone to Dust, “I want more of Nils Shapiro.” New York Times best-selling and Emmy Award-winning author Matt Goldman happily obliges by bringing the Minneapolis private detective back for another thrilling, stand-alone adventure in The Shallows.
Business is booming for private investigator Nils Shapiro and his partners.
Lawyer Todd Rabinowitz is found tied to the dock outside his Minnesota home with a fishing stinger through his jaw. His widow, Robin Rabinowitz, calls Nils to the crime scene and asks him to investigate her husband’s savage murder. She’s not the only one. Soon, Nils has more job offers than he can handle. Robin’s boyfriend. Todd’s partner at his law firm. One of Todd’s clients, a polarizing Congressional candidate. The local police, in over their heads. The FBI.
Their motives are complicated at best, and as Nils unravels the convoluted case, the bodies pile up. Someone doesn’t want him to discover what happened to Todd, and won’t stop until they silence Nils as well.
Satan’s Gate by Walt Browning
Narrated by Bronson Pinchot
Battle plans never survive first contact with the enemy….
John Eric Carver and Shrek, a retired SEAL war dog team, have created a safe haven in the high mountain desert. The remote former Boy Scout Camp seems perfect, with enough water and stored food to last years. Everything is in place to ride out the viral storm that is consuming the world.
Off the California coast, an aircraft carrier strike group carrying nearly 15,000 souls seeks refuge. There is talk of moving to an isolated island, untouched by the infected. That changes when they are given new orders to retake Los Angeles from the Variant hordes.
Survival will require courage and commitment. But most of all, it will demand sacrifice. Both groups thought they had escaped the apocalypse, but they are about to find out how wrong they are.
Do You Realize? by Kevin Kuhn
Narrated by Grant Pennington
George is a middle-management, middle-class, middle-aged guy who hates his job and struggles to stay connected to his wife and teenage children. Most guys might end up with a steamy affair and a flashy car for their midlife crises, but George gets a quirky philosophical physics professor named Shiloh. Trapped with this mysterious misfit on his morning commuter train, George is dragged into awkward conversations about love, fear, music, and the meaning of life. Shiloh also asks George to beta-test an app he wrote for the new Apple Watch – and with a free watch included, how could he say no?
When tragedy strikes, throwing George out of his uncomfortable comfort zone, he learns that Shiloh’s app lets him journey through alternate versions of his past. As challenges mount in his own reality, George must make a decision that will change him – and possibly the entire multiverse – forever.
Ash by Luke Romyn
Narrated by Jay Snyder
A former mercenary turned blind priest, Ash is running from his amoral past – a victim of a power-hungry corporation, Titanus, which used him for mysterious experiments, discarding him when he lost his sight.
Through its experimentation, Titanus unwittingly created a dark mirror world called Shade, a place where no human can survive – except for Ash. By opening a rift, Ash can escape into Shade, where his vision is restored, his wounds heal more quickly, and, if necessary, he can drag his attackers in with him, turning them to dust.
While attempting to implement a global teleportation system, Titanus makes a grave error and opens several dangerous rifts, which threaten to tear the planet apart. Believing Ash to be the only one able to close them, Titanus exploits those Ash cares about most to coerce him into cooperating.
But the creatures they have inadvertently released from Shade will be the least of their worries.
My Name Is Monster by Katie Hale
Narrated by Christine Hewitt
After the Sickness has killed off her parents and the bombs have fallen on the last safe cities, Monster emerges from the arctic vault which has kept her alive. When she washes up on the coast of Scotland, everyone she knows is dead, and she believes she is alone in an empty world. Monster begins the long walk south, scavenging and learning the contours of this familiar land made new. Slowly, piece by piece, she begins to rebuild a life.
Until, one day, she finds a girl: feral and ready to be taught all that Monster knows. Changing her own name to Mother, Monster names the child after herself. As young Monster learns from Mother, she also discovers her own desires, realising that she wants very different things to the woman who made but did not create her.
Inspired by Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein, My Name Is Monster is a novel about power, about the things that society leaves imprinted on us when the rules no longer apply and about the strength and the danger of a mother’s love.
Trapping Zero by Jack Mars
Narrated by Brian Callanan
In Trapping Zero (book 4), a terrorist cell in the Mideast gains a new, fanatic leader, one intent on orchestrating what would be the deadliest attack on American soil. Can Agent Zero uncover the plot and stop him in time?
Although Agent Zero’s daughters are home safely, the mental anguish from their experience weighs heavy on their small family. Zero, working to be a good father and to repair the damage, decides the time has come to undergo surgery to regain all of his memories. But will it work?
In the midst of it all, he is again thrust into the line of duty as a US embassy is destroyed in the Mideast and as an experimental new weapon is uncovered. But without his memories, with some of his own CIA allies intent on his destruction, whom can he really trust?
Trapping Zero (book 4) is a pause-resisting espionage thriller that will keep you listening late into the night.
Perimeter by M.A. Rothman
Narrated by Tim Campbell
Levi Yoder is a member of the Mafia and a fixer of people’s problems. He takes on issues where the law is otherwise unable to help. Unfortunately, Levi can’t fix the problem he’s facing.
Having been diagnosed with a terminal case of cancer, Levi readies himself for death, but what he didn’t prepare himself for was waking up one morning and learning that he’s in complete remission.
Perimeter is a story of a man thrust back into a life he’d assumed was over.
When he finds that he and the rest of his family are targets of what the CIA claims are elements of the Russian mob, Levi reluctantly agrees to help in whatever way he can.
As Levi immerses himself in the seedy underbelly of international organized crime and politics, he learns that he’s being targeted for something his now-dead wife did. It’s quickly evident that the people he knows can’t be trusted and the problems he needs to fix may be beyond his substantial skills.
When We Were Lost by Kevin Wignall
Narrated by Will Collyer
Survival. It’s a concept these high school students never had to consider – until their plane crashes in a remote rainforest with no adults left alive. With many of them falling prey to threats from both the jungle and man, they soon realize that danger comes in many sinister forms.
Tom Calloway didn’t want to go on a field trip to Costa Rica, but circumstances had him ending up sitting in the back of the plane – which was the only part that was intact after the crash in the remote South American wilderness. Tom and a small group of his classmates are fortunate to be alive, but their luck quickly runs out when some of them fall prey to the unfamiliar threats of the jungle – animals, reptiles, insects, and even the unforgiving heat. Every decision they make could mean life or death.
As the days go by and the survivors’ desperation grows, things get even more perilous. Not everyone can cope with the trauma of seeing their friends die, and a struggle for leadership soon pits them against each other. And when they come across evidence of other people in the middle of the rainforest, does that mean they’re safe – or has their survival come to an even more vicious end?
The Sound of Echoes by Eric Bernt
Narrated by Christopher Lane
Only one man can stop the most dangerous conspiracy ever designed in a shattering thriller about the end of secrets from the author of The Speed of Sound.
After going on the run – for what he knows and has created – autistic Eddie Parks is back in Harmony House, the think tank that has been his sanctuary for sixteen years. With his miraculous invention, an “echo box” that excavates sounds from the past, Eddie achieved the only thing he wanted: to hear his late mother sing. But where Eddie sees good, others see infamy. Because no conversation ever held will be a secret again.
For Bob Stenson, leader of the American Heritage Foundation, whoever controls the echo box controls the future. To seize the game-changing device, he has to get Eddie where he’s most vulnerable: by kidnapping Dr. Skylar Drummond, the only person in the world Eddie trusts.
But Stenson has underestimated his prey. Eddie has the power of echoes on his side. Now he must follow them – into the most dangerous places he’s ever ventured – to save Skylar and the country.
The Body Keeper by Anne Frasier
Narrated by Emily Sutton-Smith
The Thriller Award-winning series continues as Detective Jude Fontaine finds a decades-old connection to missing children that will freeze her blood.
A boy’s frozen body is found trapped in the ice of a Minneapolis lake. The horrifying discovery leads Detective Jude Fontaine and her partner, Uriah Ashby, to more bodies in the ice, all of twelve-year-old boys missing for twenty years.
Then, in one of the worst blizzards the city has ever seen, a four-year-old is abandoned on Jude’s doorstep. The child can’t tell them where he’s from, who his parents are, or how he got there. He doesn’t even know his name.
But in his unspoken language, Jude reads something horrifying – a connection to the dead boys. Now a four-year-old with no name may be the only key to a twenty-year-old, very cold case.
Rogue Strike by David Ricciardi
Narrated by Jonathan Davis
Jake Keller finds himself in a familiar position – on the run for his life and desperate to find the shadowy figures behind a global conspiracy.
CIA agent Jake Keller and his partner, Curt Roach, are in Yemen on an important mission. They’ve been tipped off to a secret meeting of top al Qaeda leaders. The plan is to interrupt the meeting with a few unexpected visitors – a pair of Hellfire missiles from an orbiting drone. But the drone stops responding to their signals and soon disappears over the horizon. When next seen, the drone is attacking innocent pilgrims in Mecca.
Jake and Curt are staggered. The US government is desperate to disavow this atrocity. Who better to blame than a couple of rogue CIA agents? With all the governments of the Middle East looking for them and no help from their own side, they are in a desperate race to stay ahead of the mob and find out who’s actually behind the crime.
