Michael Gruber has 4 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 5 narrators. The most-rated is Tropic of Night.
Valley of Bones
Summary
The setting is Miami. Rookie cop Tito Morales arrives at the Trianon hotel to investigate a routine disturbance call and, to his shock and horror, watches as a wealthy oil man plunges ten stories and impales himself on a nearby fence. Soon Morales is joined by detective Jimmy Paz, famous throughout the city for solving, or at least providing a plausible solution to, the so-called Voodoo Murders that left Miami burning months earlier.Together Paz and Morales enter the hotel and discover in the dead man's room a most unusual suspect, an otherworldly woman by the name of Emmylou Dideroff. She emerges from a prayer-like state and says she wants to confess and asks for a pen and several notebooks.What Emmylou writes is nothing like what Paz expects. He enlists psychologist Lorna Wise in an effort to make sense of things that go beyond Emmylou's explanation of the murder: details of childhood abuse, of other crimes committed, of regular communion with saints and with the devil. Is she mentally disturbed? Does she really believe herself to be an instrument of God? And why is it that so many people, including Paz's biological father, are suddenly interested in the contents of these notebooks and in preventing them from becoming public?Emmylou's "confession" leads Jimmy Paz, Lorna Wise, and Tito Morales down a series of unexpected and dangerous turns that forces them each to confront questions about faith, love, and the possibility of the miraculous.
©2005 Michael Gruber (P)2005 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
The Forgery of Venus
Summary
Chaz Wilmot makes his living cranking out old-master parodies for ads and magazine covers. When he's offered a job restoring a Venetian palace fresco, he is at first, skeptical - he immediately sees it is more a forgery than a restoration. But he is soon seduced by the challenge and throws himself into the work, doing the job brilliantly. This feat attracts the attention of Werner Krebs, a shady art dealer who becomes Wilmot's friend and patron. Wilmot is suddenly working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years, but without warning, he finds himself reliving moments from his past - not as memories but as if they are happening all over again. Soon, he believes he can travel back to the 17th century where he lived as the Spanish artist Diego Rodriguez de Silva Velazquez. Wilmot begins to fantasize that as Velazquez, he has created a masterpiece and when the painting actually turns up, he doesn't know if he painted it or if he imagined the whole thing. Little by little, Wilmot enters a secret world of gangsters, greed, and murder, with his mystery patron at the center of it all, either as the mastermind behind a plot to forge a painting worth millions, or as the man who will save Wilmot from obscurity and madness. Miraculously inventive, this book cements Gruber's reputation as one of the most imaginative and gifted writers of our time.
©2008 Michael Gruber (P)2008 HarperCollins Publishers
The Book of Air and Shadows
Summary
"Tap-tapping the keys and out come the words on this little screen, and who will read them I hardly know. I could be dead by the time anyone actually gets to read them, as dead as, say, Tolstoy. Or Shakespeare. Does it matter, when you read, if the person who wrote still lives?" Those are the words of Jake Mishkin, whose seemingly innocent job as an intellectual property lawyer has put him at the center of a deadly conspiracy and a chase to find a priceless treasure involving William Shakespeare. As he awaits a killer (or killers) unknown, Jake writes an account of the events that led to this deadly endgame, a frantic chase that began when a fire in an antiquarian bookstore revealed the hiding place of letters containing a shocking secret, concealed for 400 years. In a frantic race from New York to England and Switzerland, Jake finds himself matching wits with a shadowy figure who seems to anticipate his every move. What at first seems like a thrilling puzzle waiting to be deciphered soon turns into a dangerous game of cat and mouse, in which no one - not family, not friends, not lovers - is to be trusted. Moving between 21st-century America and 17th-century England, The Book of Air and Shadows is a modern thriller that brilliantly re-creates William Shakespeare's life at the turn of the 17th century and combines an ingenious and intricately layered plot with a devastating portrait of a contemporary man on the brink of self-discovery...or self-destruction.
©2007 Michael Gruber (P)2007 Tantor Media Inc.
Tropic of Night
Summary
Jane Doe was a promising anthropologist, an expert on shamanism. Now she's nothing, a shadow living under an assumed identity in Miami with a little girl to protect. Everyone thinks she's dead. Or so Jane hopes. Then the killings start, a series of ritualistic murders that terrifies all of Miami. The investigator is Jimmy Paz, a Cuban-American police detective. There are witnesses, but they can recall almost nothing of the events, as though their memory has been erased, as if a spell has been cast on each of them. Equally bizarre is the string of clues Paz uncovers: a divination charm, exotic drugs found in the bodies of the victims, a century-old report telling of a secret place in the heart of Africa. These clues point Paz inexorably toward the fugitive, Jane Doe, and force Jane to realize that the darkness she has fled is hunting her down. By the time her path intersects with Jimmy Paz's, the two will be thrust into a cataclysmic battle with an evil unimaginable to the Western mind.
©2003 Michael Gruber (P)2003 HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.