Blood Standard
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Narrated by:
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William DeMeritt
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By:
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Laird Barron
About this listen
A novel set in the underbelly of upstate New York that's as hard-boiled and punchy as a swift right hook to the jaw, a classic noir for fans of James Ellroy and John D. Macdonald
Isaiah Coleridge is a mob enforcer in Alaska - he's tough, seen a lot, and dished out more. But when he forcibly ends the money-making scheme of a made man, he gets in the kind of trouble that can lead to a bullet behind the ear. Saved by the grace of his boss and exiled to upstate New York, Isaiah begins a new life, a quiet life without gunshots or explosions. Except a teenage girl disappears, and Isaiah isn't one to let that slip by. And delving into the underworld to track this missing girl will get him exactly the kind of notice he was warned to avoid.
At turns brutally shocking and darkly funny, heartbreaking and cautiously hopeful, Blood Standard is both a high-tension crime novel and the story of a man's second chance - the parts of his past he will never escape, and the parts that will shape his future.
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Critic reviews
“Massive, scarred Isaiah is a thug’s thug, but he’s also a well-read student of mythology. He’s indifferent to stab wounds and generates righteous mayhem in his quest. Fans of violent crime fiction will love this one and will be eager to hear more from Isaiah.” (Booklist, starred review)
“Laird Barron’s Blood Standard is stylish, witty, and stupendously entertaining, and it gives us a main character - Isaiah Coleridge, head-cracking classics-quoting half-Maori ex(ish)-gangster - who is entirely unforgettable.” (Lou Berney, Edgar Award-winning author of The Long and Faraway Gone)
“Rendered in icy strokes of prose, Laird Barron's Blood Standard is a remarkably self-assured crime novel - at once explosive and intimate, with a tightly wound plot and wonderfully realized characters. And then there's Barron's hero, Isaiah Coleridge. He's got a dead dog named Achilles and bits of Beowulf on his breath and in his teeth. Needless to say, there's not too many like him.” (Michael Harvey, author of Brighton and The Chicago Way)
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- Length: 12 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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In number-one New York Times best-selling author Charlaine Harris’s "Dahlia Underground,” venerable vampire Dahlia Lynley-Chivers survives an attack by an anti-vampire terrorist group, only to show them they tried to blow up the wrong bloodsucker. Bailey Ruth Raeburn, a ghost assigned to assist humans in trouble, steps into the middle of a marital dispute with surprising twists in Carolyn Hart’s “Riding High”....
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Pleasantly surprised
- By Bonnie on 08-06-11
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Past Crimes
- A Van Shaw Novel
- By: Glen Erik Hamilton
- Narrated by: Jeff Harding
- Length: 10 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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From the time he was six years old, Van Shaw was raised by his Irish immigrant grandfather, Donovan, to be a thief - to boost cars, beat security alarms, crack safes, and burglarize businesses. But at 18 Dono's namesake and protégé suddenly broke all ties to that life and the people in it. Van escaped into the military, serving as an elite army ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, after ten years of silence, Dono has asked his grandson to come home to Seattle.
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15 Stars! Okay?
- By Ted on 03-06-16
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Lamentation
- By: Joe Clifford
- Narrated by: Timothy McKean
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In a frigid New Hampshire winter, Jay Porter is trying to eke out a living and maintain some semblance of a relationship with his former girlfriend and their two-year-old son. When he receives an urgent call that Chris, his drug-addicted brother, is being questioned by the sheriff about his missing junkie business partner, Jay feels obliged to come to his rescue. After Jay negotiates his brother's release from the county jail, Chris disappears into the night.
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Excellent Listen!
- By Jason on 08-19-15
By: Joe Clifford
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Rain Dogs
- By: Sean Doolittle
- Narrated by: Basil Sands
- Length: 7 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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It was one hell of an inheritance for former Chicago reporter Tom Coleman: a broken-down pickup truck, ramshackle campground, a canoe livery - and one pot-smoking, barely working employee he doesn’t need, doesn’t want, and can’t afford. But the truth is, after losing a child and a marriage, Tom doesn’t really care.
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Narration is awful
- By Karen Martin on 03-09-21
By: Sean Doolittle
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A Drink Before the War
- By: Dennis Lehane
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 8 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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With novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island, Dennis Lehane has dramatically altered the landscape of the crime thriller—while boldly overstepping the boundaries that have long separated mystery from literature. Now two of his sensational early novels have been combined in a single volume—two gritty and mesmerizing masterworks of suspense featuring the private eye duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro.
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White Bread
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 06-30-12
By: Dennis Lehane
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The Long Way Down
- Daniel Faust, Book 1
- By: Craig Schaefer
- Narrated by: Adam Verner
- Length: 9 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Nobody knows the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas like Daniel Faust, a sorcerer for hire and ex-gangster who uses black magic and bullets to solve his clients' problems. When an old man comes seeking vengeance for his murdered granddaughter, what looks like a simple job quickly spirals out of control. Soon Daniel stands in the crossfire between a murderous porn director; a corrupt cop with a quick trigger finger; and his own former employer, a racket boss who isn't entirely human.
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Urban fantasy noir. Done right..
- By Cliff on 02-19-15
By: Craig Schaefer
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The Assassins Gallery
- By: David L. Robbins
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1945, a ruthless female assassin attempts to take down the ultimate target: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And an unlikely hero, Professor Mikhal Lammeck, may be the only one who can stop her.
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Very Good Listen
- By Andrew Stone on 12-20-12
By: David L. Robbins
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Niceville
- By: Carsten Stroud
- Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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A boy literally disappears from Main Street. A security camera captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing. An audacious bank robbery goes seriously wrong: Four cops are gunned down; a TV news helicopter is shot and spins crazily out of the sky, triggering a disastrous cascade of events that ricochet across twenty different lives over the course of just 36 hours. Nick Kavanaugh, a cop with a dark side, investigates. Soon he and his wife, Kate, a distinguished lawyer from an old Niceville family, find themselves struggling to make sense of it all.
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Good Story- Wrong Reader
- By Stacy on 06-28-14
By: Carsten Stroud
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Dynamite Road
- A Weiss and Bishop Novel
- By: Andrew Klavan
- Narrated by: Andrew Klavan
- Length: 9 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A routine investigation into corruption at a North Californian airport sets in motion shocking events that lead hard man Jim Bishop and world-weary ex-cop boss Scott Weiss into the center of a massive criminal conspiracy. The trail of blood that ensues brings them dangerously closer to Weiss's old nemesis, an expert gun-for-hire known only as Shadowman and to a plan set to climax with an act of audacious violence and a murder that would be impossible for any killer but one....
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Fantastic Read
- By Peter Gage on 02-20-09
By: Andrew Klavan
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The Cleanup
- By: Sean Doolittle
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 7 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Matthew Worth is a mess. Somewhere between a good cop and a bad screwup, he botched a marriage and a career. His fellow officers think he’s a joke. His commanders are tired of cutting him breaks. Even his wife has left him for a flashy homicide detective. Busted to night patrol at a robbery-prone Omaha supermarket, Worth is doing time, wearing his uniform and asking shoppers if they want paper or plastic. If that isn’t enough, he suspects he might be falling for Gwen, the shy checkout girl who may be an even bigger mess than he is. It couldn’t get any worse. Until it does.
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A Really Good Modern American Noir Crime Novel
- By Frank Donnelly on 04-23-20
By: Sean Doolittle
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Cash City
- By: Jonathan Fredrick
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 9 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.
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Great New Series
- By Lia on 08-21-17
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Frustrating and unsatisfying
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Great Writer - Good story - VERY Wrong Reader,
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Poor Narration
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Frustrating and unsatisfying
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Incredible!
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Shannon Moss is part of a clandestine division within the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. In western Pennsylvania, 1997, she is assigned to solve the murder of a Navy SEAL's family - and to locate his vanished teenage daughter. Though she can't share the information with conventional law enforcement, Moss discovers that the missing SEAL was an astronaut aboard the spaceship USS Libra - a ship assumed lost to the currents of Deep Time. Moss knows firsthand the mental trauma of time travel and believes the SEAL's experience with the future has triggered this violence.
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What an amazing find!
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Lovecraft's Monsters
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Prepare to meet the wicked progeny of the master of modern horror. In Lovecraft's Monsters, H. P. Lovecraft's most famous creations--Cthulhu, Shoggoths, Deep Ones, Elder Things, Yog-Sothoth, and more--appear in all their terrifying glory. Each story is a gripping new take on a classic Lovecraftian creature. Contributors include such literary luminaries as Neil Gaiman, Joe R. Lansdale, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Karl Edward Wagner, Elizabeth Bear, and Nick Mamatas.
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PURPLE WARMTH
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What listeners say about Blood Standard
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Amazon Customer
- 11-23-21
Modern detective with historical angst
Enjoyed this intro book. It wasn’t detective by the numbers yet felt familiar in its story arc. Some characters are two dimensional but rather than a dig it’s probably true to more than we know. The path to redemption will be bumpy and bloody but worthy of the effort for Coleridge.
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- Rich Tate
- 06-24-19
The next great American mystery author.
If you love an old fashioned mystery and gallons of spilled blood, Laird Barron is your man.
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1 person found this helpful
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- It's Me
- 08-13-20
A Hard Listen
This was hard to listen to for a couple of reasons. In general I liked the narrator's voice and characters but the pauses drove me nuts. I listen at 2x speed normally and adjust based the narration as I can't stand the normal slower than talking speed narration. This however was like read a sentence, pause way to long for dramatic effect and let it sink in, read the next sentence, pause for dramatic effect, read the next sentence, pause for dramic effect, and so on. If you think it was annoying reading that, listen to the book.
It's almost as if the author or publishing house said, we need to lengthen the time of this somehow and came up with the decidedly bad idea to lenghten the time between sentences. I don't know if it was due to my faster than 1x listening habits that contributed to the annoying nature of this or not but talk about distracting.
The story seemed to have its moments and was interesting but it also sometimes dragged in minutia in description that didn't further anything but probably added to the word count and therefore length.
If this was re-engineered to make the narration smooth it would probably be worth the listen. Instead my recommendation is to skip it. I will not be listening to any additional books in this series.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Kyle
- 06-14-22
An excellent mystery novel, narrated wonderfully!
So yeah, everyone is great in this. Writer, narrator, they’re great. William DeMeritt does a great job playing a semi-retired mob hitman out to save a friends missing daughter.
The overarching mystery is fun to follow, even if the ending is rough. If you like mysteries, you’ll enjoy this new attempt at the genre. If you don’t like em…. Maybe start with something Patterson.
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- Luke Batchelor
- 06-19-21
5 is the highest rating. So 5 it is.
The book is not what I was looking for, until I listened to it and found that it was exactly what I wanted, even though not exactly what I had expected.
I thought this was going to be more of a cop detective mystery with some horror elements. Should've paid closer attention. This cat's no rat, nor cop. Also, a stellar narrator who has a million different voices that all come so naturally. That was pleasant.
Anyway, story was great, characters great, doesn't glorify criminals but it does shine a magnifying glass on their world, and it ain't pretty. But Isaiah Coleridge doesn't take lightly the killing of innocents, and criminals don't appreciate this weakness in him. Oh well, he is much better on this side of the law anyway, or at least acting according to his own needs.
Listen to this one.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Mark
- 09-05-18
This one was OK
This one was OK, with enough twists and turns to hold my interest. It may have lost a little direction in the latter stages but I'm interested to see Laird Barron's next effort. With a bit more polish he has the potential to reach lofty heights as a story teller.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Jash
- 12-29-22
Good but not awesome
Typical crime novel, was a stepping stone for me for the next horror novels in the same series that’s what i am interested in.
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- Kyle
- 06-25-18
Well Played
Blood Standard beautifully fits Barron’s tone with all the grit and wit of his earlier work while holding on to the air dark mystery that I will always associate with him.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Mitchell Strasner
- 10-20-20
Great story
Story was great, there’s a lot of depth to the characters and twists turns to keep guessing.... good mystery and in-depth into thug life
Narration was so very good.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Alex Sumner
- 06-11-21
Great book with good narration that gets better.
I've enjoyed Laird Barron's horror stories and was looking forward to listening to his foray into hardboiled detective fiction, a favorite genre of mine. If you've read LB before, you'll know he's all about the slow burn. Small disquieting things happen to the main character as the story unfolds, accumulating and multiplying as it progresses, with tension and dread ratcheting up throughout, till it all comes together at the coup de grâce.
Blood Standard follows along those lines too. So rather than a classic murder mystery, it's more of a melding of elements from both genres. Isaiah Coleridge is the main character. We learn about his life as an enforcer for the mob, the fall out of his choices, where he ends up as a consequence and then, finally, the missing person element that sparks his investigation. When he starts digging into her life, looking for clues, he finds more than he bargained for.
I enjoyed the story a lot. Isaiah Coleridge's wit and erudite dialog is very amusing as he interacts with the other characters. The story itself is about many things. Organized crime, gangs, police corruption, medical duplicity, hillbillies, aryan nation, shady deals, the seedy underbelly of society, a wholesome horse ranch and Reba, the troubled teen that's mixed up in all of it that's gone missing.
Isaiah also has precognitive abilities that give him a bit of a heads up on how to handle the many dangerous situations he finds himself in. He sees warnings about individuals or events to come and has wild dreams that could be his mind's way of dealing with his subconscious issues. Or they're visions. Take your pick.
The narration. *sigh* I'm on the fence about it. (Probably spoiled by the last few books I've listened to that were awesome.) Not sure if William DeMeritt was new to narrating when he performed on Blood Standard, but he's not doing Isaiah justice. He has an excellent voice. Its deep tone is pleasant to listen to, but he lacks range, especially at the beginning. He starts out reading the story, instead of narrating it. There's no differentiation between descriptive sections and Isaiah's dialog which results in a lack of clarity as events unfold. Many of the characters exchanges (in Alaska especially) sound like all one voice, which leaves the interaction muddy and muted. There are sparks of vividness in Blood Standard, where everything comes alive, but that occurs well into the book. Much of the story blends together and unfortunately (and this is a total bummer) there's no timing to his delivery. So frustrating. Comedic timing. Dramatic timing. It's not there. A hesitation or a pause could've added a lot of impact to what's being said or enhanced the exchange, adding bite to a sarcastic comment. William DeMeritt's delivery is very workmanlike, so Isaiah's best wise cracks are read in the same cadence as the rest of the narrative, which was such a missed opportunity. I found myself wanting to say, Hey! Don't just throw the line away like that! The wise cracking PI is what makes hardboiled detective stories. (Also - grammar police warning! Lunge is mispronounced through the entire book. Reba lunged a horse several times at the farm in their lunge ring and Reba's grandmother is observed lunging a difficult horse there as well. Instead of saying 'luhnj' (to lengthen), William DeMeritt says lung, like the organ. Lung-ed, lung-ing, the lung ring, making me cringe every time.)
Laird Barron's writing is quick and intelligent with a lot of things being communicated subtly and overtly at the same time. It's a pity that's only glimpsed intermittently through Blood Standard. I guess this is an example of the difference between a good narrator and a great one. The potential is there for William DeMeritt. He has a lot of the elements already. He just has to up his game in the emoting department. Adding expression to the dialog, capturing the rhythm of the story and letting it breathe will make his narration a great listening experience. By the midway point to the end of the book he exhibited more range, with many of the characters that were vague at the start, now stepping off the page, crisp and distinct. Hopefully his performance keeps improving through the rest of the series.
Overall I enjoyed Blood Standard. It still has LB's signature disquieting horror elements (supernatural and mundane) mixed in with the grimness and stylish elements of hardboiled fiction. It's not a 'fun' mystery. It's more of a turning over the rocks and seeing what unpleasant things are exposed kind of story, with engaging characters, interesting scenarios and lyrical descriptions. I love his writing style and am happy there's two more stories available to listen to.
I'm on to the next book, Black Mountain.
ETA: Don't stop here! The narration is excellent in Black Mountain and Worse Angels. (The stories too.) I'm adding another star from my original review. It's well worth listening to the whole series.
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