Jerry Bader has 6 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 4 narrators. The most-rated is Cowboys, Lawmen, and Outlaws: The Myth of the American Psyche.
Deception
Summary
The world is a dangerous place, and every country has men and women tasked to protect it. These people go by many names: Secret agent, intelligence officer, and analyst are just a few. Harry is one such person. He is an analyst. He spends his time reading, researching, and analyzing, followed by writing reports that often never see the light of day. Harry is well educated with a seemingly important job, but Harry is bored. Bored, because analysts never get to be the hero, never get to order cocktails stirred not shaken, and, never, never, get the girl. Harry is frustrated, frustrated because his superiors told him the report he just spent six months working on is to be tabled, and no, he can’t have a field operative to work with to follow up. Harry has one very dangerous character flaw, he has an imagination, not something the men on the top floor appreciate. Harry needs to prove himself; he needs some excitement in his life, and that excitement comes in a deadly package of intrigue and murder that combines something called the Sister Project with a Russian master spy, H, K. Kyrsa, code name, the Beautiful Rat, and the devastatingly gorgeous Harriet. The question is, is it all just happening in Harry’s head, or is there a real plot that needs to be stopped? Is Harry just plain crazy, or are the Russians out to mess with the West one more time? Harry is on his own, not sure who to trust. Are there any good guys in the world of espionage? The only way to find out is to find Kyrsa, the Beautiful Rat. Join Harry in his search for what may not even be real.
©2019 Jerry Bader (P)2019 Jerry Bader
Noir I
Summary
Noir I is four stories: "The Gold Cricket", "The Bastard", "Cine City", and "Killer Jazz". "The Gold Cricket" Detective Joanne Leslie has a fondness for the finer things in life, including the best cocaine money can buy. Unfortunately, her lifestyle and a detective's salary don't comfortably coexist. Drug dealer Cheesy Johnston wants his money, cash he needs to replace the $5,000 he's paying Jake Klein to get him out of the country. What Cheesy doesn't know is Klein is a bounty hunter tasked with bringing him in for trial. "The Bastard" A Russian gangster's wife kidnaps her estranged husband's illegitimate son and murders the Yakuza-affiliated mother in order to protect her own daughter's birthright as sole heir to her husband's substantial legal and illegal business empires. As an adult, the bastard son surreptitiously reappears to reclaim his share of his father's fortune. "Cine City" A-list actor Bobby Richards hires a second-rate film producer with a gambling problem to make an art film that's guaranteed to lose money. Richards signs over his rights to the film to his wife in a spiteful attempt to make sure she doesn't get a dime out of their nasty divorce battle, but things don't work out exactly as planned. "Killer Jazz" Maurice Delbourne, the jazz musician son of a legendary reggae star and political activist, is targeted for death in LA. Rival Jamaican gangs each backing opposing political parties fear Delbourne might be a populist political option. Can Delbourne's friend and a beautiful waitress stop the gangster's plan, or will Delbourne end up like his father dead on stage in front of his fans?
©2018 Jerry Bader (P)2019 Jerry Bader
The Aussie Switch
Summary
Horse trainers Davey and Pauly Cisco are looking for a fresh start in Southern California after wearing out their welcome in their native Australia. The Cisco twins are identical in looks but not personality. Pauly, like most horse trainers, pushes the envelope of acceptable practice, while his look-alike brother rips through regulations with regularity and abandon. It didn't take long for the two brothers to hook up with a couple of con men: an expert computer hacker who likes e-gaming and a shyster stock promoter on the lookout for eager marks willing to blow their fortunes on a shady horse-betting consortium. The one thing they didn't count on is an associate of Benson Yeung's Hong Mian triad: an ex-South Korean colonel who operates a crooked international gambling empire. Two corrupt confidence men, unethical twin horse trainers, and doppelgänger thoroughbreds add up to a combustible confluence of confusion, misdirection, and murder, with tentacles that twist their way through LA, Sidney, Hong Kong, Seoul, and Macau.
©2019 Jerry Bader (P)2019 Jerry Bader
Delusion: Lucy's Breath
Summary
On a chilly November New York City morning in 1953, a scientist working for the CIA on psychotropic mind-control experiments walked off the 10th-floor balcony of the Statler Hotel. He had become increasingly disenchanted with the bizarre and incredibly dangerous work he had been doing in service to national security. Despite the patriotic rationale, the scientist felt his life’s work was immoral and most certainly illegal. He wanted out - unfortunately, he knew too much, and knowing too much is a very precarious position to be in if you work for a clandestine operation run by America’s very own version of Josef Mengele, the Angel of Death. The scientist insisted on getting out, and out he got, through the window and off the balcony of the Statler Hotel on that brisk fall morning in Manhattan. Was suicide his solution for terminating his deal with the devil, or did the devil do him in? It’s impossible to say. The evidence although in plain sight is murky and blurred by time and the self-preservation of those responsible. I know what you’re thinking: not in my America, not in my beloved United States, not in the home of the brave and the land of the free. Unfortunately, it did happen; it’s the kind of thing that happens when governments feel an existential threat. America has a fundamental flaw, an Achilles heel of perspective and attitude; it fails to understand history and its place in it. In the words of philosopher, George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If you believe it can’t happen here, I urge you to take a look at the Wall Street Putsch of 1933, and the name of one of the participants. You might find it informative. It could happen again. America is under siege by a series of existential threats. It’s not some crackpot conspiracy theory; it’s history. The question I have is: Which is more dangerous, the external threat or the internal threat? For those who cling to Senator Barry Goldwater’s Cold War aphorism, “Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice.” I urge you to remember the past because if you don’t, you will be condemned to a future you did not expect and an existence you will be forced to endure. What follows could happen and maybe will happen if you allow extremism to take hold of the levers of power.
©2019 Jerry Bader (P)2020 Jerry Bader
Stone Cold: Between a Stone and a Hard Place
Summary
On the surface Major William Stone (Retired) is merely a rich English expatriate with a diverse military and financial services background now living in Palermo, Argentina, where he runs a small art gallery along with his assistant Margarita Cervantes. If you scratch the surface, you'll find that Stone was recently the chauffeur for Mrs. Josephine Murphy, heiress to the Murphy Peanut Butter Company, the largest peanut butter manufacturer in the USA, and owner of numerous expensive thoroughbred racehorses. This seemingly incongruous set of circumstances gets even more intriguing when you learn that Stone inherited over one billion dollars when Josephine Murphy died in a tragic, and somewhat questionable, car accident in the hills of Palermo, Sicily leaving Major Stone the bulk of her estate. After the Murphy estate is settled, Stone disappears to reemerge in Argentina leading a quiet and peaceful life as a wealthy art gallery owner and financier. His good fortune is tempered by the fact he left the love of his life, Jesse James, protégé to gangster Johnny Luck, back in LA. The problem is, Major William Stone died in the Falkland Islands and the man now assuming his modified identity is disgraced MI6 financial wizard Jacob Conrad. Conrad took the fall for his Vauxhall Cross masters' illegal shenanigans ending up in jail with a lengthy prison term. According to the British newspaper reports, Conrad died in Belmarsh Prison, only to be resurrected by Section Six's cyber boffins as William Stone, international financial consultant living in Hong Kong, where he runs into Charlie Long, Dragon Head of the Wan Chai and a major rival of the Hong Mian, led by Benson Yeung and Johnny Luck. Stone Cold dives deep into the back-story of how Jacob Conrad becomes William Stone, why he disappeared leaving Jesse behind, and who'll control the flow of cocaine into the USA. From Hong Kong to Palermo, London, Cacaloxuchitl, Mexico, and Los Angeles, this is a tale of secret agents, drug dealers, money launders, and murders, all wrapped in a delicious recipe of greed, envy, cocaine, and peanut butter chili.
©2019 Jerry Bader (P)2019 Jerry Bader
Cowboys, Lawmen, and Outlaws: The Myth of the American Psyche
Summary
Cowboys, Lawmen, and Outlaws: The Myth of The American Psyche Preface In the 1950s, westerns were the most popular form of television drama. Saturday mornings were filled with black and white images of Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger, and The Cisco Kid. In the evening you had the more adult westerns like Have Gun - Will Travel, Rawhide, and Wanted Dead or Alive. Sprinkled amongst these shows were programs purporting to be about real historic characters, people like Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Bat Masterson, Annie Oakley, and Wild Bill Hickok. Although Gunsmoke's Marshal Matt Dillon wasn't real, the Long Branch Saloon was. Of course writer John Meston's Matt Dillon was much closer to a real cowboy lawman than what was represented by James Arness. William Conrad's radio version was somehow more real, more colorful, and more dramatic than the whitewashed television version even though the stories were similar. Perhaps it's just a malleable memory but somehow radio always felt more real, more vivid, and more present than television. Television turned everything into pabulum; even fascinating gritty historical characters were turned into cardboard-cutouts designed for the front of cereal boxes featuring the soft mushy historical mess that lay inside. The difference between cowboys, lawmen, and outlaws was merely a cheap metal badge: most often these designations were interchangeable with men easily moving from marshal to villain and back with the deal of a card. When we think of the Old West, it seems like ancient history, but historically it was yesterday. Many of the characters of the post Civil War Old West lived well into the 20th century: Bat Masterson died in 1921 and Wyatt Earp didn't die until 1929. Josie Bassett, one of the Wild Bunch girls, managed to hang on until 1963 and she only died then because she got kicked in the head by a horse. History doesn't end with an era - remnants, artifacts, and people overlap.
©2018 Jerry Bader (P)2018 Jerry Bader