California Fire and Life
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Narrated by:
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Jon Lindstrom
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By:
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Don Winslow
About this listen
Jack Wade, a claims adjuster for California Fire and Life Mutual Insurance Company, is one of the best arson investigators around. He's a man who knows fire, who can read the traces it leaves behind like a roadmap. When he's called in to examine an unusual claim, the tracks of the fire tell him that something's wrong. So wrong that he violates his own cardinal rule - "You don't get personal, you don't get emotional. Whatever you do, you don't get involved" - and plunges into the case.
Real estate mogul Nicky Vale's house is one of the most valuable properties on this stretch of the Southern California gold coast - large, luxurious, crammed with antiques, set on a nice piece of land with a perfect ocean view. After a disastrous blaze tears through a wing of the house, it's only normal that Vale would file an insurance claim. But a $3 million claim is rarely normal, especially not when it's filed within hours of the horrific death of the owner's young and beautiful wife. The County Sheriff's Department investigator, Brian "Accidentally" Bentley, has declared the fire, well, accidental - caused by Mrs. Vale's passing out in bed with a bottle of vodka and a lit cigarette - although a careful look at the evidence points to something more sinister.
When Jack begins his investigation, he draws on his skill, experience and sheer stubbornness to uncover the truth of what's going on, but each step leads him further into a situation that's becoming increasingly dangerous. Soon arson is the least of Jack's worries, as the case grows to involve the Russian mob, Vietnamese gangs, real estate scams, counterfeiting and corporate corruption. In addition, Jack's forced to confront his own ghosts, including a fatal professional error, and to cope with the sudden reentry into his life of the best thing that ever happened to him: Letitia del Rio, a Sheriff's deputy whose bombshell looks are exceeded only by her smarts and guts.
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L.A. police detective Shane Scully comes under investigation by Internal Affairs (derisively known as "the tin collectors") after he kills his ex-partner who was one of the mayor's bodyguards. Temporarily reassigned, so that he can remain under the department's watchful eye, Scully finds that more than his badge is at stake when he is set up to take the rap in a deadly plot of corruption and conspiracy that reaches to the highest levels of the LAPD.
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Police Procedural Gone Bad
- By Chip Atkinson on 02-21-18
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Cash Landing
- A Novel
- By: James Grippando
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Every week a hundred million dollars in cash arrives at Miami International Airport, shipped by German banks to the Federal Reserve. A select group of trusted workers moves the bags through customs and loads them into armored trucks.
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Good Start To The Series
- By Lia on 10-21-18
By: James Grippando
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Against the Wind
- By: J. F. Freedman
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 14 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Lone Wolf, Roach, Goose, and Dutchboy - four wild ones who have lived their lives on the wrong side of the law. They are members of the outlaw motorcycle gang, the Scorpions - men with their own brand of justice. Now they stand accused of the gang-rape of a motel maid of dubious reputation and the brutal murder of a friend of hers in the mountains outside Santa Fe. But they claim they are innocent.
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Against the Wind
- By shelley on 04-19-14
By: J. F. Freedman
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No Angel
- My Harrowing Undercover Journey to the Inner Circle of the Hells Angels
- By: Jay Dobyns, Nils Johnson-Shelton
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Getting shot in the chest as a rookie ATF agent, bartering for machine guns, throttling down the highway at 100 miles per hour, and responding to a full-scale, bloody riot between the Hells Angels and their rivals, the Mongols - these are just a few of the high-adrenaline experiences Jay Dobyns recounts in this action-packed, hard to imagine, but true story of how he infiltrated the legendary Hells Angels.
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"I would avoid this one..."
- By Chris on 12-27-12
By: Jay Dobyns, and others
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Big City, Bad Blood
- By: Sean Chercover
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Disillusioned newspaper reporter-turned-private detective Ray Dudgeon doesn't want to save the world; he just wants to do an honest job well. But when doing an honest job threatens society's most powerful and corrupt, Ray's odds of survival make for a sucker's bet.
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Quintessentially Chicago
- By Eva Gannon on 09-21-09
By: Sean Chercover
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Beach Wedding
- A Novel
- By: Michael Ledwidge
- Narrated by: Neil Hellegers
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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When Terry Rourke is invited to the spare-no-expense beach wedding of his hedge fund manager brother, he thinks that his biggest worry will be flubbing the champagne toast. But this isn’t the first time Terry has been to the Hamptons. As the designer tuxedos are laid out and the flowers arranged along the glittering surf, Terry can’t help but take another look at a decades-old murder trial that rocked the very foundations of the town—and his family.
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yawn.....
- By Spencer on 06-26-22
By: Michael Ledwidge
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Detroit
- An American Autopsy
- By: Charlie LeDuff
- Narrated by: Eric Martin
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In the heart of America, a metropolis is quietly destroying itself. Detroit, once the richest city in the nation, is now its poorest. Once the vanguard of America’s machine age - mass production, automobiles, and blue-collar jobs - Detroit is now America’s capital for unemployment, illiteracy, foreclosure, and dropouts. With the steel-eyed reportage that has become his trademark and the righteous indignation that only a native son can possess, journalist Charlie LeDuff sets out to uncover what has brought low this once-vibrant city, his city.
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WOW
- By Avid Reader and Listener on 07-09-13
By: Charlie LeDuff
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The Ritual Bath
- The First Peter Decker and Rina Lazarus Novel
- By: Faye Kellerman
- Narrated by: Mitchell Greenberg
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Detective Peter Decker of the LAPD is stunned when he gets the report. Someone has shattered the sanctuary of a remote yeshiva community in the California hills with an unimaginable crime. One of the women was brutally raped as she returned from the mikvah, the bathhouse where the cleansing ritual is performed.
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Good Read
- By Eva Gannon on 08-21-08
By: Faye Kellerman
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The Monkey's Raincoat
- An Elvis Cole and Joe Pike Novel, Book 1
- By: Robert Crais
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 8 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Elvis Cole, L.A. private eye.... He quotes Jiminy Cricket and carries a .38. He's a literate, wisecracking Vietnam vet who is determined never to grow up.
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Slaughtered by sickeningly awful reader
- By Lehua of Pacifica on 06-11-09
By: Robert Crais
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The Fallen
- By: T. Jefferson Parker
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 10 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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My life was ordinary until three years ago when I was thrown out of a downtown hotel window. My name is Robbie Brownlaw, and I am a homicide detective for the city of San Diego. I am 29 years old. I now have synesthesia, a neurological condition where your senses get mixed up. Sometimes when people talk to me, I see their voices as colored shapes provoked by the emotions of the speakers, not by the words themselves. I have what amounts to a primitive lie detector.
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OK, but...
- By Robert E. Orlando on 01-01-14
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The Postmortal
- A Novel
- By: Drew Magary
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 10 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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In a world where an anti-aging cure is available worldwide, immortality comes with its own unique problems. John Farrell is about to get "The Cure". Old age can never kill him now. The only problem is, everything else still can.
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Interesting concept but bleak and wearing
- By Amazon Customer on 05-15-12
By: Drew Magary
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LOVED IT!
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The truth always come home...
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In six intense short novels connected by the themes of crime, corruption, vengeance, justice, loss, betrayal, guilt, and redemption, Broken is number-one international best seller Don Winslow at his nerve-shattering, heart-stopping, heartbreaking best. In Broken, he creates a world of high-level thieves and low-life crooks, obsessed cops struggling with life on and off the job, private detectives, dope dealers, bounty hunters, and fugitives, the lost souls driving without headlights through the dark night on the American criminal highway.
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This explosive novel of the drug trade takes you deep inside a world riddled with corruption, betrayal, and bloody revenge. From the streets of New York City to Mexico City and Tijuana to the jungles of Central America, this is the war on drugs like you've never seen it.
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Gripping Drama
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All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is “the King of Manhattan North,” a, highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of “Da Force.” Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest, an elite special unit given unrestricted authority to wage war on gangs, drugs and guns. Every day and every night for the eighteen years he’s spent on the Job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
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Brilliantly written and narrated. But hard to listen to.
- By dan in alta loma on 06-07-24
By: Don Winslow
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Crime 101
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A string of high-level jewel heists up and down the Pacific Coast Highway has gone unsolved for years, mostly because the perpetrator has lived by a strict code he calls “Crime 101”. Police attribute the thefts to the Colombian cartels. But Detective Lou Lubesnick’s gut says it’s the work of just one man. Now the lone-wolf jewel thief is looking for that fabled final last score, and Lou breaks all the rules of "Crime 101".
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Love Don Winslow!
- By Candy on 10-21-21
By: Don Winslow
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Deep Hole
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- Original Recording
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In Deep Hole, one of the world’s foremost crime novelists crafts a sweet, poignant romance novella that could only come from his perfectly calibrated sense of time and place. It incorporates fights and misunderstandings and rejection, and is set against the backdrop of a quiet surfing town in Rhode Island where everyone knows each other’s business—and pleasure.
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Another Great story By Mr. Winslow
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By: Don Winslow
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Dietrich
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It’s the summer of ’77 in New York City, and the only thing more unnerving than the scorching heatwave is the rampant murder, leaving washed-up homicide detective Richard Dietrich on edge. When Dietrich investigates a brutal mob hit the brass doesn’t want him to solve, he goes from phoning it in to getting in over his head. Caught up in a mysterious second homicide with an even more perplexing perpetrator, Dietrich starts to second guess his instincts—and his memory—as he searches for answers at the bottom of a bottle.
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Very good!
- By Kathleen on 04-17-24
By: Don Winslow
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City on Fire
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Two criminal empires together control all of New England. Until a beautiful woman comes between the Irish and the Italians, launching a war that will see them kill each other, destroy an alliance, and set a city on fire. Danny Ryan yearns for a more “legit” life and a place in the sun. But as the bloody conflict stacks body on body and brother turns against brother, Danny has to rise above himself.
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Gripping, vivid and extremely entertaining
- By Victor @ theAudiobookBlog dot com on 04-26-22
By: Don Winslow
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Free Billy
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From the master of crime fiction comes an unexpectedly whimsical short story about this San Diego surfer whose life plan is working perfectly until he meets a wealthy woman at an art gallery opening (the hors d’oeuvres), falls in love, and then has to masquerade as an upstanding member of society.
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Quirky and Fun short story
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By: Don Winslow
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Oregon
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It was 1970 in a defeated Rhode Island fishing town. Vietnam and Nixon dominated the national news. Both the near and distant future looked bleak. But they were five inseparable high school friends with something incredible in common: an unwavering resolve to look after each other no matter what hell life threw at them. And they were on a mission. The plan was simple: Go off the grid before they turned 18 to avoid the draft. They’d sell some grass, stack some cash, then head west and start a commune. What could possibly go wrong?
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This really hit home.
- By Ray Beaulieu on 05-26-24
By: Don Winslow
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Shibumi
- By: Trevanian
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- Unabridged
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Nicholai Hel, born in the ravages of World War I China to an aristocratic Russian mother and a mysterious German father, raised in the spiritual gardens of a Japanese Go Master, survives the destruction of Hiroshima to emerge as the world's most artful lover and its most accomplished and highly paid assassin. Genius, mystic, master of language and culture, Hel's secret is his determination to attain a rare kind of personal excellence, a state of effortless perfection: shibumi.
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Only a Russian could be this shibumi
- By David on 07-15-12
By: Trevanian
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The Heron
- By: Don Winslow
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- Length: 1 hr and 6 mins
- Original Recording
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“The Heron” is the nickname a big-city accountant has attached to himself in his new home near San Diego, where he’s using the alias to avoid a hit man who may be after him. It seems a former client believes that The Heron has skipped town with several million dollars not his own. Don Winslow’s ensuing, entertaining yarn is by turns twisty, dark, and comical as we observe the delicate dance between the pursuer and the pursued.
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Awfully long middle for such a short story
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 07-29-22
By: Don Winslow
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Downward Facing Doug
- By: Don Winslow
- Narrated by: Ed Harris
- Length: 1 hr and 8 mins
- Original Recording
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One September morning, Doug accidentally runs right into another surfer on the beach. There are rules about these things. The other guy should call Doug a jerk, Doug should say, "my bad", and they should both paddle back out and move on. Problem is, the other surfer doesn't want to move on. He wants to fight. And for once in his life, Doug wants to fight back.
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It’s always the quiet ones
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 07-21-24
By: Don Winslow
What listeners say about California Fire and Life
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- John E
- 06-06-15
Fantastic!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Don Winslow knocks it out of the park with this one! Ive read all of Don's books. While this one is technically heavy he really stretches out with his prose beautifully here and proves once again, that he is a master of the craft. The reader is great as well.
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- Holly M.
- 01-15-19
Almost great but still immensely enjoyable
Like in “The Force”, my first of this author’s books, I couldn’t stop listening to this book! Don Winslow’s painstaking research and vivid detail about fire behavior/fire investigation (and the whole insurance and underwriting industry), as many other reviewers have already commented, was bizarrely compelling and sometimes even riveting. I learned so much about such a strange topic, and enjoyed it.
The dog-headed main character, Jack, is immensely relatable and likable, despite his somewhat Rain Man-like repetition of certain phrases and the redundant cadences Winslow has given to his character’s “voice” (listen to it and you’ll know what I’m referring to!). At times I found this a little annoying, almost like he had a tic, but mostly it just served to cement the vibrant character we come to know Jack to be.
The pacing of the story, while mostly enjoyable and finding an easy rhythm, was also somewhat inconsistent: at times a bit slow, then nearly perfect starting about three/four hours from the ending (when I couldn’t stop listening!). My only complaint is that as the book reached its conclusion, Winslow seemed to be in a real hurry to weave together a number of complicated plot lines and extra characters at a pace that seemed a huge departure from the rest of the book. The otherwise-simple story became a bit confusing at times, and almost lost me once or twice. In the end, he wraps things up way too abruptly for my taste, after having taken such time to build texture and nuance. I found this to be slightly jarring and a bit disappointing, as I was expecting and hoping for a big, suspenseful blowout of an ending after all the buildup. (You do get a big ending, but it just wraps up too neatly with its glossy bow, and by the conclusion, you will have expected the final plot twists for quite some time.) It’s almost as if Winslow got tired of writing, or ran into a production deadline
I’d give it 4 1/2 stars instead of 5 for these reasons.
Nonetheless, a very enjoyable listen, and admittedly hard to put down. I will continue to buy Don Winslow‘s books and can’t wait to pick up the next one!
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- snowman
- 08-29-17
Winslow rocks
Winslow simply has great stories, great characters and fully formed endings that are often bittersweet with poignant reflections on love, life and family. I plan to read everything he's written. So far my favorites are santori and the cartel
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- Kerr
- 09-16-19
California Vibes
Is there anyone else that captures the SoCal lifestyle like Winslow?
This book isn’t as gritty as his others, but there are the usual graphic sex scenes.
Like his other novels, it’s apparent that Winslow has researched the hell out of anything related to the central topic of the novel. I like that. It makes it authentic.
Narrator was top-notch.
Worth a credit, especially if you’ve enjoyed other Winslow novels.
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- Barry Schuler
- 06-27-19
A complete surprise
I loved this book. Especially since I had no expectations of what it was. So like a passenger in a commercial aircraft I put my faith in Captain Winslow and was rewarded with yet another intellectual thriller filled with interesting scientific sidebars and conspiracies that cut uncomfortably close to the real world. Brilliant.
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- DWM
- 06-27-19
Almost believable
I really enjoy his writing and I enjoyed the book, but at Chapter 260 things get almost too far fetched for me too go along with. How about call the police? All in all a fun read and great character.
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- Bisonman
- 12-30-18
Fun way to learn about fire and insurance
This is a decent crime story with a good hearted main character. Good primary villain and plenty of plot twists too. A little ridiculous at the very end but by then the story was worth putting up with a little silliness. I never knew how much science there is in firefighting or claims adjusting.
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- scottB
- 06-25-22
Good solid Winslow
I have been on a pretty serious Winslow kick lately after discovering him just in the last couple of months when his latest book city of Hope came out. I’m going to have to say that this story felt slightly contrived compared to everything else I’ve listen to by him so far. Don’t get me wrong, I still loved it, and couldn’t wait to keep listening, but some of it just felt a little forced.
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- Donna
- 08-21-17
Four
This reminds me so much of a series written by Joseph Hansen in the 70s (I think). I loved those books.
I read this one because one reviewer said she was amazed how interesting the author made all the fire facts. She was correct, the nitty gritty was fascinating. Overall, this book is a very good read/listen
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Overall
- Kindle Customer
- 11-20-17
Started out slow, but ended on fire!
I have now learned more about insurance than I really need to know but the narrative enhanced the story and it is one heck of a story. The Russian Mafia piece was very interesting. Made The Godfather
look like a teddy bear. Definitely worth the listen. Don Winslow never lets me dowen.
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