Hey! Got a couple a weeks to kill this Summer? Narrator Roy Dotrice returns to the series that nobody can stop waiting for…
A Dance With Dragons (A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five)
By George R.R. Martin; Read by Roy Dotrice
38 CDs – Approx. 49 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 9780739375976
Sample |MP3|
In the aftermath of a colossal battle, the future of the Seven Kingdoms hangs in the balance—beset by newly emerging threats from every direction. In the east, Daenerys Targaryen, the last scion of House Targaryen, rules with her three dragons as queen of a city built on dust and death. But Daenerys has thousands of enemies, and many have set out to find her. As they gather, one young man embarks upon his own quest for the queen, with an entirely different goal in mind. Fleeing from Westeros with a price on his head, Tyrion Lannister, too, is making his way to Daenerys. But his newest allies in this quest are not the rag-tag band they seem, and at their heart lies one who could undo Daenerys’s claim to Westeros forever. Meanwhile, to the north lies the mammoth Wall of ice and stone—a structure only as strong as those guarding it. There, Jon Snow, 998th Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch, will face his greatest challenge. For he has powerful foes not only within the Watch but also beyond, in the land of the creatures of ice. From all corners, bitter conflicts reignite, intimate betrayals are perpetrated, and a grand cast of outlaws and priests, soldiers and skinchangers, nobles and slaves, will face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Some will fail, others will grow in the strength of darkness. But in a time of rising restlessness, the tides of destiny and politics will lead inevitably to the greatest dance of all.
And in the new releases in non-fiction department comes a story that that sounds like fiction…
Sex On The Moon
By Ben Mezrich; Read by Casey Affleck
7 CDs – Approx. 8 Hours 30 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Random House Audio
Published: July 2011
ISBN: 9780307750761
Sample |MP3|
Thad Roberts, a fellow in NASA’s prestigious Neutral Bouyancy Laboratory, had an idea. A romantic, albeit crazy, idea. He wanted to give his girlfriend the moon. Literally. Somehow he convinced his girlfriend, also a NASA fellow, and another female accomplice, to break into an impregnable laboratory at NASA’s headquarters and help him steal the most precious objects in the world: the moon rocks. To get to the lunar vault, Thad and his accomplices would have to go through the high-security entrance of Building 31, the most protected structure at the Johnson Space Center, wind their way past a half dozen additional checkpoints until they came to an electronically-locked steel door with cipher security codes, monitored by a camera-lined hallway. And then there was the safe where the moon rocks were stored. Labeled “Trash,” this vault was something out of a Swiss Bank, three-feet-thick, made out of steel, and with an enormous combination wheel that took at least two people to turn. Against all odds, the team made a clean get-away (at 5 mph no less, the compound’s inflexible speed limit). But what does one do with an item so valuable that it’s illegal even to own. And was Thad Roberts — undeniably gifted, picked for one of the most competitive scientific posts imaginable, a potential astronaut — really what he seemed. From the author of the New York Times bestselling Accidental Billionaires comes this strange but true story of genius, love, and duplicity, centered around an Ocean’s Eleven style heist that reads like a Hollywood thrill-ride.
Never before available as an audiobook? How, exactly, did we miss this?
Radio Free Albemuth
By Philip K. Dick; Read by Tom Weiner
6 CDs – Approx. 6.8 Hours [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Blackstone Audio
Published: November 2009
ISBN: 9781433291647
Philip K. Dick’s impassioned final novel is a wild and visionary alternate history of the United States. It is 1969, and a paranoid president has convulsed America in a vicious war against imaginary internal enemies. As the country slides into fascism, a struggling science fiction writer named Philip K. Dick is trying to keep from becoming one of that war’s casualties. Meanwhile, Dick’s best friend, a record executive named Nicholas Brady, is receiving transmissions from a God-like extraterrestrial intelligence, which he dubs Valis, who apparently wants him to overthrow the president. Agonizingly suspenseful, darkly hilarious, and filled with enough conspiracy theories to thrill the most hardened paranoid, Radio Free Albemuth is proof of Dick’s stature as our century’s greatest science-fiction writer.
Cory Doctorow had good things to say about this new collection of Edgar Allan Poe tales.
Poe’s Detective: The Dupin Stories
By Edgar Allan Poe; Read by Bronson Pinchot
4 CDs – Approx. [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Go / BBC Audiobooks America
Published: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 9781609981624
Edgar Allan Poe is the undisputed originator of the Detective story. His brilliant, imaginative sleuth C. Auguste Dupin set the stage for eccentric, logic wielding investigators like Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot. This audio collection of Poe’s three Dupin stories also includes one non-Dupin detective tale, Thou Art the Man. It features celebrity narrator Bronson Pinchot. The story titles are: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue“; “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt“; “The Purloined Letter“; and “Thou Art the Man.”
The first of a batch of new Richard Stark audiobook releases…
The Hunter (Book 1 in the Parker series)
By Richard Stark; Read by John Chancer
5 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours 1 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Go / BBC Audiobooks America
Published: January 18, 2011
ISBN: 9781609981068
You probably haven’t noticed them. But they’ve noticed you. They notice everything. That’s their job. Sitting quietly in a nondescript car outside a bank making note of the tellers’ work habits. Lagging a few car lengths behind the Brinks truck on its daily rounds. Surreptitiously jiggling the handle of an unmarked service door at the racetrack. They’re heisters. They’re pros, and Parker is far and away the best of them. In The Hunter, the first volume in the series, Parker roars into New York City, seeking revenge on the woman who betrayed him and on the man who took his money, stealing and scamming his way to redemption.
Long out of print in audio, back in print in time for the latest novel, and totally missing from the publisher’s website…
The Sins Of The Fathers (Book 1 in the Matthew Scudder series)
By Lawrence Block; Read by Alan Sklar
4 CDs – Approx. 5 Hours 2 Minutes [UNABRIDGED]
Publisher: Audio Go
Published: March 8, 2011
ISBN: 9781609982683
The pretty young prostitute is dead. Her alleged murderer–a minister’s son–hanged himself in his jail cell. The case is closed. But the dead girl’s father has come to Matthew Scudder for answers, sending the unlicensed private investigator in search of terrible truths about a life that was lived and lost in a sordid world of perversion and pleasures.The hooker was young, pretty…and dead, butchered in a Greenwich Village apartment. The prime suspect, a minister’s son, was also dead, the victim of a jailhouse suicide. The case is closed, as far as the NYPD is concerned. Now the murdered prostitute’s father wants it opened again–that’s where Matthew Scudder comes in. But this assignment carries the unmistakable stench of sleaze and perversion, luring Scudder into a sordid world of phony religion and murderous lust where children must die for their parents’ most unspeakable sins.
And finally, Ben Aaronovitch has noted that audiobook version of Moon Over London, the follow up to Rivers Of London, “will be available for download from the 21st of July.” It’ll be up on Audible with Kobna Holdbrook-Smith reprising the narrating duties. Though I should note that the first book is not available, bizarrely, in all regions.
Posted by Jesse Willis
The Keeper of Lost Causes
Don W. Jenkins, a San Diegan, may not be the ideal narrative match for this 1919 English murder mystery/Science Fiction novel, but he’s competent enough for the price, 100% FREE! The novel itself isn’t going to break any heads open with its sheer awesomeness either – but The Green Rust is a competent reading of a competent early twentieth century murder mystery (that’s also got some SF elements in it). Plus, it’s got some great vocabulary, a fairly compelling mystery at the center of it (who would kill a man on his deathbed?), the occasional dollop of hilarious dialogue (“Drunk or sober he is a man! Drunk or sober he is a man!” and “she’s as dumb as an oyster”) as well as some quaint technology on display (home gas meters run by coins). 