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THE COMFORT of BLACK (audiobook) by Carter Wilson

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Audio version released in January of 2016 by LLC Cherry Publishing. Originally published by Oceanview Publishing in August of 2015. Read by Rebecca Roberts Duration: 9 hours, 21 minutes Unabridged Hannah Parks is a survivor. She grew up in an incredibly verbally abusive home and watched her mother be physically abused by her father on a regular basis. But, one day, she fought back and now her father is in jail and she is married to a tech genius whose start-up has become a major corporation. But, Hannah and her husband have been growing apart. When she hears him dreaming about raping a woman and discovers a secret porn file on his computer she confronts him only to have him fly into a violent rage. She leaves him only to have him try to kidnap her. But, a man named Black intervenes. A man she doesn't even know kidnaps her away from the kidnappers and now Hannah's life really starts to disintegrate... If you love a book with a lot of plot twists, well this is your

BADLANDS: A NOVEL (Cassie Dewell #3) by C.J. Box

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Published in July of 2015 Cassie Dewell was the lead character in 2013's The Highway , a gritty novel with a truly creepy bad guy. Dewell is a young widow who lives with her wacky mother and her son. Dewell makes the move from Wyoming to North Dakota in this book.  This is a good move by all accounts - there is a substantial raise, a promotion in rank  and it lets Dewell get out of a bad work situation detailed in The Highway . A fracking operation in North Dakota. Photo by Joshua Doubek. Grimstad, North Dakota is in the center of the new oil boom. Thanks to "fracking",  it exploded from a little farm town to one of the fastest growing economic centers in the world. It has become the kind of town where anyone can get a job but no one can get a place to sleep and you have to wait for half an hour just to order at the local McDonald's. The local sheriff has a problem. He knows that gangs are moving in to sell drugs and run prostitutes and he's pretty sure

RECKLESS (Ty Hauck #3) by Andrew Gross

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Slow Going At First. Published in 2010. For a book that is all about how quickly the world's stock markets can be played by a few bad actors who don't particularly care about making money so much as they care about wreaking havoc, this book took a very long time to get started. Part of that is my fault. I failed to realize that I was in the middle of a series until after I had read this book. I had read the second installment in this series 7 years ago but I literally remembered nothing about the main character, Ty Hauck. In this installment, Hauck is in the suburbs of New York City. He is working for a corporation as a security consultant, meaning he investigates people the company may work with and gets involved with internet breaches and the like. Hauck's company is investigating an big-time investor with a hidden past. But, Hauck has a personal connection to the murders of a Wall Street broker and his family and soon finds a connection to a third murder that

PIRATE LATITUDES by Michael Crichton

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Published in 2009. The year is 1665 and the English colony of Jamaica is surrounded by a constellation of Spanish colonies. The Caribbean is in a near-perpetual state of war as English privateers attack Spanish treasure galleons hauling literally tons of New World silver and gold to Spain. Charles Hunter is the captain of an English privateer ship named Cassandra (or, he is simply a pirate when Spain and England are not at war). He has learned that Spain has a fortress on a remote island called Matanceros to protect ships that attempt, but fail to make the trip to Spain. They cannot return to their port of origin alone. In fact, the less time they are alone and exposed to privateers, the better. So, Spain has built an impregnable fortress to protect such ships.  Michael Crichton (1942-2008) At least it is supposed to be impregnable. Hunter is very sure that he has figured out a way that the perfect team can infiltrate the fort and then take the ship that it is supposed to pr

JIM BECKWOURTH: NEGRO MOUNTAIN MAN by Harold W. Felton

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Originally printed in 1966 As you can tell by the title, Jim Beckwourth: Negro Mountain Man  has a hopelessly out-of-date title. When it was written in 1966, the term "negro" was still considered to be acceptable, of course. Jim Beckwourth Jim Beckwourth (1798-1866) was born in Virginia and moved out to the frontier, roughly in the St. Louis area, before he moved out on his own. He apprenticed as a blacksmith but didn't really pursue that career. Instead, he set off as part of larger expeditions and quickly earned a reputation for being tough, fair and honest. And, perhaps most important, he was considered to be dependable in an environment where almost nothing was dependable. Beckwourth's skin color did not seem to hurt him any as he trapped beaver, scouted for military expeditions and explored the American West. He even served in the Second Seminole War in Florida. It seems that real talent was valued a lot more than a man's race. But, the bulk of t

THE BONE FEUD (audiobook) by Wynne McLaughlin

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Read by Charles Hinckley Duration: 4 hours, 15 minutes Unabridged A lot of people don't know that the end of the classic Cowboy era was the beginning of a dinosaur rush. Paleontologists went out West and found all sorts of skeletons and shipped them back East to be installed in museums. Reputations were made based on who could find the biggest and most exotic fossils. Edward Cope with a fossil Two scientists,    Edward Cope and O.C. Marsh tried their best to outdo one another as their teams explore the American West. Sometimes they just compete, sometimes they actually try to hurt the other guy's operations.  The book is told from the point of view of an old Western guide/stagecoach robber who joined with one of the scientists and helped him navigate the landscape and local politics and is now telling the story to a reporter. This story was adapted from a movie script. It listens like a "movie of the week"-type fun western. Nothing too serious, but yo