murder – Page 18

Review of Press Enter_ by John Varley

SFFaudio Review

SFFaudio’s 7th Anniversary Reviewathon continues!

Press Enter_
By John Varley; Read by Peter Ganim
2 Hours 53 Minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audible Frontiers
Published: 2008
Themes: / Science Fiction / Mystery / Murder / Computers / Hacking /

This novella won the Best Novella Hugo in 1985 and the Best Novella Nebula in 1984. In 1984 I was 16, and my prize possession was a Commodore 64 computer. I recall programming on it, writing stories, and playing games. hmm. Not much has changed since then but the hardware, it looks like.

A story published in 1984 in which computers play a huge role is a history lesson. Floppy disks, modems, BBS’s – made me long for the good ole days. What was science fiction in 1984 now reads like historical fiction with an SF twist.

Victor receives a phone call one day from a computer, which tells him to run next door to his neighbor’s house. It will keep calling until he does it, says the computer. So he does, entering the house of a man he didn’t know well and finding him dead, an apparent suicide. Police and others are called in because this dead neighbor was into a lot of stuff: surveillance of neighbors, hacking into government systems, manipulation and theft of big money, all through his computers and his phones. Peter Ganim narrates the mystery well.

This is the longest story I’ve reviewed so far this month; it clocks in at 2 hours, 53 minutes. I LOVE novellas, and there is so much great science fiction out there at this length. Hollywood, take note! If you are mining for material, check out the science fiction novella.

Audible Frontiers has published many novellas, including more by John Varley (The Persistance of Vision is really excellent) and some by Connie Willis and Allen Steele.

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Review of A Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe

SFFaudio Review

Another short story! Will he ever stop?

The Cask of Amontillado
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by B.J. Harrison
17 Minutes – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: The Classic Tales Podcast
Published: 2008
Themes: / Horror / Murder / Revenge / Pride / Bricklaying /

It must be understood, that neither by word nor deed had I given Fortunato cause to doubt my good will. I continued, as was my wont, to smile in his face, and he did not perceive that my smile now was at the thought of his immolation.

From the two birds, one stone department, this classic story by Edgar Allan Poe. I wanted to read it again because it is the first story covered in a Teaching Company course I bought a while back called Masterpieces of Short Fiction, taught by Michael Kransky. I selected this particular audio version because I like the stories I’ve heard on B.J. Harrison’s The Classic Tales Podcast, and expected that he’d be particularly good with this one. I wasn’t disappointed! Very well done.

I’m enamored with this story, and not because I’d like to brick someone in myself. It’s a perfect little story, and horrifying. An inner portrait of a murderer, who calmly does his thing, and is disturbingly resolute. At one point, Fortunato refuses to speak to him. All he hears is the jingling of the bells on the victim’s cap in the dark. The story works so well.

The Teaching Company lecture was good. I looked at the Wikipedia entry for “Cask” and learned that Poe wrote this story as a response to a rival named Thomas Dunn English. The explanation is very clear, and things like the wild masonic gesture made by Fortunato make sense in that context. The lecture didn’t mention that, even though the origin of the story was discussed. Kransky said that it’s origin lay in an anecdotal story that Poe heard about someone who got buried alive, combined with class envy. Does the Wikipedia article overstate the case? Something to look into.

I’d love a course on the science fiction short story. I wonder which stories should be included in such a course? Click here to see which stories Michael Kransky included in Masterpieces of Short Fiction.

And be sure to check out B.J. Harrison’s The Classic Tales. I got this story from Audible.com, which is where The Classic Tales go after they are podcast. Here’s the podcast feed:

http://classictales.libsyn.com/rss

Posted by Scott D. Danielson

Aural Noir review of Killing Floor by Lee Child

Aural Noir: Review

Killing Floor
By Lee Child; Read by Dick Hill
12 CDs – Approx. 14 Hours 48 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2004
ISBN: 9781423339854 (cd)
Themes: / Thriller / Murder / Mystery / Detective / Georgia / Conspiracy / Counterfeiting / Music /

All is not well in Margrave, Georgia. The sleepy, forgotten town hasn’t seen a crime in decades, but within the span of three days it witnesses events that leave everyone stunned. An unidentified man is found beaten and shot to death on a lonely country road. The police chief and his wife are butchered on a quiet Sunday morning. Then a bank executive disappears from his home, leaving his keys on the table and his wife frozen with fear. The easiest suspect is Jack Reacher – an outsider, a man just passing through. But Reacher is not just any drifter. He is a tough ex-military policeman, trained to think fast and act faster. He has lived with and hunted the worst: the hard men of the American military gone bad.

I’d heard about Lee Child for a while before I started reading his books. For a time there there was some confusion in my mind about who he was and what he wrote. I heard vague talk down the isles of bookstores. “Got any Child?” They’d say. “Lincoln?” They’d whisper. Or was it “Lee?” Then I’d hear about some character called “Repairman Jack” – or was it “Jack Reacher?” So with the confusion in the hearing it took a while longer than usual for the facts about who wrote what to float up from my unconscious to the part of my brain that thinks: “interesting.” The last time I heard about Lee Child was in Jolly Olde Books in Port Moody. That’s a used bookstore I frequent. The guy who runs the place reads Lee Child, and a couple of other booksellers I see in their from time to time were reading him too. They got to talking about how addictive the series was and that was the final clincher. When you run a used bookstore you really have your pick of books. They were reading Lee Child, so I thought I’d better get on the case too. Luckily Brilliance Audio has released most of this series, with at least one other done by Random House Audio.

But, even having the audiobook in hand, I had a hard time getting interested in listening to it. It sure doesn’t help to have such a generic title. And just look at it, the cover art is boooring. Apparently this is a very popular series, a bestselling series. That explains both the generic cover and the generic title. Killing Floor, the name sounds like just about every other techno-thriller/courtroom thriller/forensics thriller you’ll find in the supermarket paperback book rack; and that cover art only tells you vaguely about the genre – nothing about the story. The story starts out promisingly enough though. The story is told in first person, past tense (my preferred person and tense) by the protagonist, Jack Reacher. He tells us what is happening without much embroidery. When Reacher is arrested for murder, within the first few seconds of the novel, I was intrigued. It seemed like some sort of variation on David Morrell‘s First Blood: A stranger walks into small town USA and is arrested by corrupt cops. Fun. When the facts of Reacher’s backstory eventually drip out I still found myself fairly interested. Child’s explanation as to why Reacher is such a bad-ass actually makes pretty good sense too. What kind of police deal with the world’s most dangerous criminals? Child’s answer is: Military Police. The criminals the US Army deals with have been trained with every conceivable deadly art: firearms, hand to hand combat, artillery, grenades, demolitions – the many different ways of killing. A military policeman (MP) has to be trained better with these weapons than the criminals he confronts. And so an MP has to deal with the army’s best trained criminals: Green Berets, Rangers, Delta Force. Jack Reacher, we eventually find out retired from the army as a Major, having run his own criminal investigation unit (homicide investigation). A bit convienient but not too implausible. The mystery itself seems fairly interesting and Child wants to play fair. But there is one giant co-incidence that badly mars the narrative. It’s fairly well lampshaded by Reacher, but even in doing that I wasn’t wholly willing to forgive Child.

This novel has plenty of good characters and characterization. I can also see the seeds of themes that will probably reappearing in later books in the series. Like many novels of the last 25 years that I complain about Killing Floor is overly-long for the material it contains. The action sequences in the later chapters of the book are solid, but there were too many for the machinations of the plot. After listening all the way through I’d say this a solid novel with fairly good storytelling. I can see exactly what Lee Child is doing and am not particularly impressed. He’s gonna make a lot of money, but I can’t imagine anyone would ever bother to re-read one of these books. More likely they’ll just pick up another in the series and get more of the same kind of thing, just a bit different. It’s a slightly less obvious Mack Bolan story, a romance novel for men. So this is several steps removed from anything like spectacular.

Narrator Dick Hill has been a major audiobook narrator for longer than I’ve been an audiobook listener (that’s a long time). In Killing Floor he personifies Jack Reacher with a conspiratorial first person voice. When playing the other major players, criminals, love interests and fellow investigators he switches tone just enough to make it clear who’s speaking. I hope he reads more books in this series as if he does, and I get up enough interested to read another, I’d like him to narrate it.

Posted by Jesse Willis

LibriVox: The Valley Of Fear by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Aural Noir: Online Audio

LibriVox I’ve previously written about the Sherlock Holmes novel called The Valley Of Fear. It feels like a rather unusual Holmes novel given that Holmes isn’t actually present in the majority of the narrative. But, if you think about the most famous Holmes story of them all (also a novel) The Hound Of The Baskervilles, you may also recall that Sherlock Holmes wasn’t in that one much either. Unlike The Hound Of The Baskervilles, where most of the action stems from a local English legend, most of plot of The Valley Of Fear takes places in the United States – taking inspiration from a real life criminal conspiracy. Still, Conan Doyle isn’t importing everything. We get lots of details about master-criminal Professor Moriarty and his non-fiction inspiration (Jonathan Wild) too.

This newly released version, available free from LibriVox.org, is a complete narration by a single reader, Katie Riley. While she hasn’t given us the definitive FREE edition, there are several mispronunciations in the first few chapters, her reading is serviceable.

The Valley Of Fear
By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Read by Katie Riley
15 Zipped MP3 Files or Podcast – Approx. 6 Hours 23 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: LibriVox.org
Published: February 8, 2010
Doyle’s final novel featuring the beloved sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, brings the detective and his friend to a country manor where they are preceded by either a murder or a suicide. A secretive organization lies culprit and an infiltration of it is in order.

Podcast feed: http://librivox.org/rss/3664

iTunes 1-Click |SUBSCRIBE|

[Thanks also to Diana Majlinger and Leni]

Posted by Jesse Willis

New Releases: Jonathan Stroud, Dean Koontz, Peter Straub, Star Wars, Robert B. Parker, S.J. Parris

New Releases

Here’s a batch of new releases!

We talked about the first two on the latest SFFaudio Podcast. Of the others that are forthcoming it is the length of Robert B. Parker’s novel Split Images that has me most excited. A new novel that’s just 4 CDs long but still UNABRIDGED? That’s terrific! Meanwhile Heresy, a new historical murder mystery written under a pseudonym, sounds very interesting. Random House is releasing the unabridged version only as a digital download. We can probably see that on audible.com later this month.

The Eyes Of Darkness
By Dean Koontz; Read by Tanya Eby
8 CDs – Approx. 10 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: January 3, 2010
ISBN: 1441817166
A year had passed since little Danny’s death – a year since his mother began the painful process of acceptance. But Tina Evans could have sworn she just saw her Danny in a stranger’s car…then she dreamed that Danny was alive. And when she awoke, she found a message waiting for her in Danny’s bedroom – two disturbing words scrawled on his chalkboard: NOT DEAD. Was this someone’s grim joke? Her mind playing tricks on her? Or something…more? For Tina Evans, it was a mystery she couldn’t escape. An obsession that would lead her from the bright lights of Las Vegas to the cold shadows of the High Sierras. A terrible secret seen only by…The Eyes of Darkness.

Heroes Of The Valley
By Jonathan Stroud; Read by David Thorn
CDs – [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: January 27, 2009
ISBN: 9780739382202

Halli Sveinsson has grown up in the House of Svein, hearing the legends of the heroes as all his forefathers did. Theirs is a peaceful society, where the violence of the past has been outlawed and disputes are settled by the Council. But young Halli has never quite seemed to fit in with the others. For starters, he is neither handsome nor tall, like his siblings. He’s stumpy and swarthy, with a quick mind and an aptitude for getting into trouble. Bored with everyday chores and sheepherding, he can’t help playing practical jokes on everyone, from Eyjolf, the old servant, to his brother and sister. But when he plays a trick on Ragnar of the House of Hakon, he goes too far, setting in motion a chain of events that will forever alter his destiny. Because of it, Halli will have to leave home and go on a hero’s quest. Along the way, he will encounter highway robbers, terrifying monsters, and a girl who may be as fearless as he is. In the end he will discover the truth about the legends, his family, and himself.

A Dark Matter
By Peter Straub; Read by Robertson Dean
12 CDs – Approx. 14 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: February 9, 2010
ISBN: 9780739322413
The incomparable master of horror and suspense returns with a powerful, brilliantly terrifying novel that redefines the genre in original and unexpected ways. The charismatic and cunning Spenser Mallon is a campus guru in the 1960s, attracting the devotion and demanding sexual favors of his young acolytes. After he invites his most fervent followers to attend a secret ritual in a local meadow, the only thing that remains is a gruesomely dismembered body—and the shattered souls of all who were present. Years later, one man attempts to understand what happened to his wife and to his friends by writing a book about this horrible night, and it’s through this process that they begin to examine the unspeakable events that have bound them in ways they cannot fathom, but that have haunted every one of them through their lives. As each of the old friends tries to come to grips with the darkness of the past, they find themselves face-to-face with the evil triggered so many years earlier. Unfolding through the individual stories of the fated group’s members, A Dark Matter is an electric, chilling, and unpredictable novel that will satisfy Peter Straub’s many ardent fans, and win him legions more.

Star Wars: Clone Wars: Gambit: Stealth
By Karen Miller; Read by Jeff Gurner
10 CDs – Approx. 12 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: February 23, 2010
ISBN: 9780739376898
The first installment of a two-book Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker adventure, set against the backdrop of the Clone Wars! – Planet by planet, darkness creeps across the galaxy. Among warriors and generals, among ordinary beings living in far-flung worlds, the fear will not go away: We are losing this war… Anakin Skywalker feels it, too. The Separatist Alliance, with ruthlessness and treachery, is beating the Republic to every strategic target. But after a costly clash with General Grievous for the planet Kothlis, Anakin has a mission that will focus his anxious mind. Alongside Obi-Wan Kenobi, he is posing as a long-lost native of Lanteeb, an impoverished world on the Outer Rim. This seemingly unimportant planet has drawn the interest of the Seps—and Anakin and Obi-Wan soon discover the disturbing reason: A scientist enslaved by General Lok Durd is drawing on Lanteeb’s one natural resource for a devastating bioweapon. Now Anakin and Obi-Wan have entered the eye of a storm. Their presence has been exposed, Lok Durd’s plans unveiled, and a fight has begun for survival behind enemy lines—and a chance of winning a war that must be fought at any cost.

Heresy
By S.J. Parris (aka Stephanie Merritt); Read by John Lee
5 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours [ABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: February 23, 2010
ISBN: 9780307714299
Masterfully blending true events with fiction, this blockbuster historical thriller delivers a page-turning murder mystery set on the sixteenth-century Oxford University campus. Giordano Bruno was a monk, poet, scientist, and magician on the run from the Roman Inquisition on charges of heresy for his belief that the Earth orbits the sun and that the universe is infinite. This alone could have got him burned at the stake, but he was also a student of occult philosophies and magic. In S. J. Parris’s gripping novel, Bruno’s pursuit of this rare knowledge brings him to London, where he is unexpectedly recruited by Queen Elizabeth I and is sent undercover to Oxford University on the pretext of a royal visitation. Officially Bruno is to take part in a debate on the Copernican theory of the universe; unofficially, he is to find out whatever he can about a Catholic plot to overthrow the queen. His mission is dramatically thrown off course by a series of grisly murders and a spirited and beautiful young woman. As Bruno begins to discover a pattern in these killings, he realizes that no one at Oxford is who he seems to be. Bruno must attempt to outwit a killer who appears obsessed with the boundary between truth and heresy. Like The Dante Club and The Alienist, this clever, sophisticated, exceptionally enjoyable novel is written with the unstoppable narrative propulsion and stylistic flair of the very best historical thrillers.

Split Image (a Jesse Stone novel)
By Robert B. Parker; Read by James Naughton
4 CDs – Approx. 4 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: February 23, 2010
ISBN: 9780739357484
The body in the trunk was just the beginning. Turns out the stiff was a foot soldier for local tough guy Reggie Galen, now enjoying a comfortable “retirement” with his beautiful wife, Rebecca, in the nicest part of Paradise. Living next door are Knocko Moynihan and his wife, Robbie, who also happens to be Rebecca’s twin. But what initially appears to be a low-level mob hit takes on new meaning when a high-ranking crime figure is found dead on Paradise Beach. Stressed by the case, his failed relationship with his ex-wife, and his ongoing battle with the bottle, Jesse needs something to keep him from spinning out of control. When private investigator Sunny Randall comes into town on a case, she asks for Jesse’s help. As their professional and personal relationships become intertwined, both Jesse and Sunny realize that they have much in common with both their victims and their suspects—and with each other.

Posted by Jesse Willis

BBCR4 + RA.cc: Double Indemnity

Aural Noir: Online Audio

For me Double Indemnity is the best of Film Noir. It takes the filmic art form to the highest of the black and white heights. It faithfully captures James M. Cain’s novella like no other film has done with any novel.

When I read about this BBC radio dramatization of Double Indemnity I kept my expectations low – that probably helped me enjoy it all the more – but I can’t imagine any fan of either the novel or the film being disappointed by this rare gem. It is more than terrific! Theresa Russell as Phyllis Deitrichson is superior to Barbara Stanwyck‘s iconic role. Her performance has me wanting to watch Black Widow again.

Double Indemnity
Based on the novella by James M. Cain;
Adapted by John Fletcher; Performed by a full cast
1 MP3 (via torrent) – 1 Hour 29 Minutes [RADIO DRAMA]
Broadcaster: BBC Radio 4 / Saturday Night Theatre
Broadcast: 1993

Cast:
Walter Huff …. Frederic Forrest
Lola …. Molly Ringwald
Phyllis …. Theresa Russell
Keyes …. John Wood
Nerdlinger …. Michael Drew
Norton …. John Goraczio
Jackson …. John Baddeley
Nettie …. Geraldine Fitzgerald
Zachetti …. Roger May

Original Music by Barrington Pheloung
Technical presentation by Graham Hoyland, Dave Parkinson, Andrew Lawrence, Fiona Baker, Christine Hall, Mark Decker
Directed at Christchurch Studios in Bristol by Andy Jordan

You can get Double Indemnity via TORRENT at RadioArchive.cc.

And speaking of FILM NOIR, has anybody got room for a hitchhiker? I’d really like to be in San Fransisco by tomorrow afternoon…

NOIR CITY from Film Noir Foundation on Vimeo.

Posted by Jesse Willis