Keith Szarabajka has narrated 84 audiobooks on Listento.it by 69 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 1,726 ratings. The most-rated is Goodbye, Things.
Backflash
Summary
After the publication of Butcher’s Moon in 1974, Donald Westlake said, “Richard Stark proved to me that he had a life of his own by simply disappearing. He was gone.” And listeners waited. But nothing bad is truly gone forever, and Parker’s as bad as they come. According to Westlake, one day in 1997, “suddenly, he came back from the dead, with a chalky prison pallor” - and the novels that followed showed that neither Parker nor Stark had lost a step. Backflash finds Parker checking out the scene on a Hudson River gambling boat. Parker’s no fan of either relaxation or risk, however, so you can be sure he’s playing with house money - and he’s willing to do anything to tilt the odds in his favor. Featuring a great cast of heisters, a striking setting, and a new introduction by Westlake’s close friend and writing partner, Lawrence Block, this classic Parker adventure deserves a place of honor in any crime fan’s library.
©1997 Richard Stark; Foreword Lawrence Block (P)2013 AudioGO
Empire
Summary
I have lost everything - my purpose, my love, my soul. Death knocks on my door. I want to answer, but every time I reach for the handle, the promise I made her brings me back. So I breathe. I live. I hate. And I allow the anger to boil beneath the surface of a perfectly indifferent façade. I am broken, and I don't want to be fixed. One last trip to New York, one last chance to redeem a lost part of the Mafia family. The Empire is crumbling, and it's my job to fix it. It's my job to mend the pieces that were scattered over 30 years ago. But the only way to fix it is to do something I swore I'd never do again: an arranged marriage. This time I won't fall. Or so help me God, I'll kill her myself. My name is Sergio Abandonato. You think you know my pain, my suffering, my anger, my hate. You have no idea. I am the Mafia. I am the darkness. Blood in. No out.
©2016 Rachel Van Dyken (P)2016 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Fadeout
Summary
Fadeout is the first of Joseph Hansen’s twelve classic mysteries featuring rugged Dave Brandstetter, an insurance investigator who is contentedly gay. When entertainer Fox Olson’s car plunges off a bridge in a storm, a death claim is filed, but where is Olson’s body? As Brandstetter questions family, fans, and detractors, he grows certain Olson is still alive and must find him before the would-be killer does. Suspenseful and wry, shrewd and deeply felt, Fadeout remains as fresh today as when it startled readers more than thirty years ago.
©1970, 2019 Joseph Hansen (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The End Time Saga Boxed Set, Books 1-3
Summary
The first three novels and a bonus short story of the End Time Saga in one boxed set. Almost 40 hours of thrilling postapocalyptic viral outbreak fiction! In the dark primal jungles of the Congo River Basin, a deadly microbe is mutating at breakneck speed. Before the world can react, a deadly viral outbreak is ravaging the local populations. A team of counterterrorism agents is sent to retrieve a doctor in the collapsing nation...but this is just the knock on the door for the end of the world. Over the course of a few months, along with the rest of the world, America collapses piece by piece, turning the nation into a grim wasteland where the chances for survival are slim. Watch your six with counterterrorism agents as they try to keep a doctor and each other alive. Join a team of CDC doctors as they race to find a cure and the virus picks them off one by one. Scramble with a retired Air Force colonel thrust into the command of a Special Forces team trying to prop up a dying government. Flee before a delusional pastor and his followers as they burn their way across the land. Rebel with a rural town about to become the epicenter of a resistance movement and the return of a farmer’s daughter, propelled into a position to lead them. Who will rise? Who will fall? The only certainty is the dead will rule over all. Enter: the End Time Saga. Books included in this boxed set: Book 1: End Time Book 2: The Breaking Book 3: The Rising Bonus material: "The Gun: The End Time Saga Origin Short Story"
©2018 Daniel Greene (P)2019 Blackstone Publishing
Young Orson
Summary
For the centennial of his birth, the defining wunderkind of modern entertainment gets his due in a groundbreaking new biography of his early years - from his first forays in theater and radio to the inspiration and making of Citizen Kane.
No American artist or entertainer has enjoyed a more dramatic rise than Orson Welles. In this magisterial biography, Patrick McGilligan brings young Orson into focus as never before. He chronicles Welles' early life growing up in Wisconsin and Illinois, as the son of an alcoholic industrialist and a radical suffragist and classical musician, and the magical early years of his career, including his marriages and affairs, his influential friendships, and his artistic collaborations. The tales of his youthful achievements were so colorful and improbable that Welles, with his air of mischief, was often thought to have made them up. Now, after years of intensive research, McGilligan sorts out fact from fiction and reveals untold, fully documented anecdotes of Welles' first exploits and triumphs, from starring as a teenager on the Gate Theatre stage in Dublin and bullfighting in Seville to his time in the New York theater and his fraught partnership with John Houseman in the Mercury Theatre, and to his arrival in Hollywood and the making of Citizen Kane. Filled with intriguing new insights and startling revelations - including the surprising true origin and meaning of "Rosebud" - Young Orson is a fascinating look at the creative development and influences that shaped this legendary artistic genius.
©2015 Patrick McGilligan (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Nomad
Summary
Something big is coming...big enough to destroy the entire solar system...and it's heading straight for Earth. That's what Dr. Ben Rollins, head of Harvard's exoplanet research team, is told by NASA after being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night. His first instinct is to call his daughter and wife, who are vacationing in Italy: Something is coming, he tells them, a hundred times the mass of our sun. We can't see it, we don't know what it is, but it's there. They're calling it Nomad, and it's coming fast. In just a few months, the Earth may be destroyed. The world erupts into chaos as the end approaches - and Ben discovers that his wife and daughter are trapped in Italy. The key to humanity's survival may rest in the final answers he pieces together in the midst of his frantic scramble to find his family before Nomad swallows the planet.
©2015 Matthew Mather (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Why We Love Serial Killers
Summary
For decades now, serial killers have taken center stage in the news and entertainment media. The coverage of real-life murderers such as Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer has transformed them into ghoulish celebrities. Similarly, the popularity of fictional characters such as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter or Dexter demonstrates just how eager the public is to be frightened by these human predators. But why is this so? Could it be that some of us have a gruesome fascination with serial killers for the same reasons we might morbidly stare at a catastrophic automobile accident? Or it is something more? In Why We Love Serial Killers, criminology professor Dr. Scott Bonn explores our powerful appetite for the macabre, while also providing new and unique insights into the world of the serial killer, including those he has gained from his correspondence with two of the world’s most notorious examples, David Berkowitz ("Son of Sam") and Dennis Rader ("Bind, Torture, Kill"). In addition, Bonn examines the criminal profiling techniques used by law enforcement professionals to identify and apprehend serial predators, he discusses the various behaviors - such as the charisma of the sociopath - that manifest themselves in serial killers, and he explains how and why these killers often become popular cultural figures. Groundbreaking in its approach, Why We Love Serial Killers is a compelling look at how the media, law enforcement agencies, and public perception itself shapes and feeds the "monsters" in our midst.
©2014 Scott Bonn (P)2014 Audible Inc.
The Fissure King
Summary
In the classic noir tradition of Have Gun - Will Travel, Rachel Pollack - one of the world's foremost authorities on the Tarot - gives us the tale of Jack Shade, an occult shaman for hire. Jack Shade has a secret, and this hidden part of his past sends him on a journey through time and space and a great number of metaphysical doorways. From the cozy poker table in the 11th-floor apartment of the Hôtel de Rêve Noire to the ethereal Forest of Souls to the faded houses along the Gold River, Jack flows in and out of this world. Even when his own duplicate hires him to kill himself, Jack is mercury in motion. Jack the Nimble, Jack the Quick. The Fissure King: A Novel in Five Stories collects the four existing Jack Shades novellas and shows us Jack's final trick - one last story that finally reveals Jack's true nature. Only Rachel Pollack, an award-winning novelist and comic book writer, could dream of someone as mischievous and mythopoeic as Jack Shade. The king is dead. Long live the king.
©2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc. (P)2017 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Clan and Crown
Summary
For the first few years, Rick Galloway and his band of mercenaries were doing well just to survive. They'd been swept off a hilltop in Africa by a flying saucer and deposited on an alien world where the other inhabitants were human - but from various and unfriendly periods of history, all collected by flying saucer raids. Rick has faced facts: This place is going to be home, permanently. To create a safe society for themselves and the families they are gradually building, they need to do more than just survive; they must convince the others that a unified, peaceful society is better than a collection of warring tribes. Force would not be Rick's chosen method of persuasion, but on a planet where the other dominant culture is one brought straight from ancient Rome, force may be the only way.
©1982 Jerry Pournelle and Roland Green (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Janissaries
Summary
Some days it just doesn’t pay to be a soldier. Captain Rick Galloway and his men had been talked into volunteering for a dangerous mission, only to be ruthlessly abandoned when faceless CIA higher-ups pulled the plug on the operation. They were cut off in hostile territory, with local troops and their Cuban “advisors” rapidly closing in—and then the alien spaceship landed. Rescued from certain death, they now must fight another world’s war.
©1979 Jerry Pournelle (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Die, Snow White! Die, Damn You!
Summary
Audie Award Nominee, Original Work, 2013 Audie Award Nominee, Original Work, 2013 With the premiere of two new film versions of the Snow White tale, Blackstone enters the fray with its own adult, edgy, and not altogether serious full-cast exposé of fairy-taledom. At last it can be told! Was Snow White really as pure as the driven snow? Did her allegedly wicked stepmother get a bum rap from the Grimm brothers? What went on behind the closed Dutch doors of the dwarves’ cottage? How many handsome princes does it take to screw in a light bulb? These and other burning questions may or may not be answered in this new pseudogothic audio play that Blackstone commissioned from award-winning author and audio dramatist Yuri Rasovsky.
©2012 Yuri Rasovsky (P)2012 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Hitman
Summary
From the New York Times best-selling author of The Brothers Bulger comes the story of Johnny Martorano, whom the FBI called “the most feared man in the underworld.” Martin Scorcese’s The Departed barely touched his story, but radio talk show sensation, crime reporter, and Boston Herald columnist, Howie Carr, takes us into the heart of the life of Johnny Martorano. For two decades Martorano struck fear into anyone remotely connected to his world. His partnership with Whitey Bulger and the infamous Winter Hill Gang led to 20 murders for which Johnny would serve only 12 years in prison. Carr also looks at the politicians and FBI agents who aided Johnny and Whitey and at the flamboyant city of Boston which they so ruthlessly ruled. But most of all, Carr depicts Johnny—the most fascinating crime figure Carr has ever encountered. A plethora of paradoxes, he was Mr. Mom by day and man-about-town by night. Surrounded by fast-living politicians, sports celebrities and show biz entertainers, Johnny was charismatically colorful—as charming as he was frightening. After all, he was in the end…a hitman. After graduating from high school, John Martorano turned down seven football scholarships and instead stayed in Boston. Hanging out in the notorious Combat Zone, he fell under the guidance of Stephen Flemmi--high ranking Winter Hill mobster and close associate of James "Whitey" Bulger--and by the age of 25, Martorano was a professional killer. He became one of the Winter Hill Gang's most prolific--and feared--enforcers. This is the gripping true-life story of Martorano's years killing for the Winter Hill Gang, told in Carr's arresting inimitable style.
©2011 Frandel, LLC (P)2011 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
End Time
Summary
The protests in front of the embassy aren't what they seem.... In the dark, primal jungles of the Congo Basin, something is ravaging the local population. When protests turn violent in front of the US embassy in Kinshasa, only the foreign policy experts paid attention. Civil war erupts, and people rip each other apart in the streets of the African capital. To avert disaster and preserve its self-image, an overwhelmed State Department dispatches a team of elite counterterrorism agents to bring their besieged people back alive. Mark Steele, a young agent within the division, and his team of gritty operatives are used to trudging through the worst society has to offer, all while operating from the shadows. But Steele's team is plunging headlong into a maelstrom of death so much worse than rebels in the streets. A highly contagious microbe is spreading unchecked, killing everyone in its wake only to bring them back again as the ravenous undead. Only a lone CDC virologist understands the extent of the outbreak at hand. He cowers among the embassy staff praying for extraction from the hands of death, fearing his part to play in the epidemic. Follow this harrowing tale of survival, duty, love and horror as the living dead bring the world to its knees. The first installment of an epic series, End Time starts as a slow burn that turns into a breakneck-paced struggle for survival. Greene does an excellent job of depicting individual stories within the larger scope of the global epidemic. Enter the End Time.
©2018 Daniel Greene (P)2018 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
MEG: Angel of Death: Survival
Summary
From the best-selling author of the MEG series comes an action-packed trilogy that takes place during the four-year gap between Meg (book one) and The Trench (book two). While the stories focus on Angel, the Megalodon pup that was captured at the end of book one, in Survival, Steve Alten delves into the major characters and the challenges they faced in being caretakers of the apex predator of all time.
©2020 Steve Alten (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
This Is Your Brain on Sports
Summary
This Is Your Brain on Sports is the audiobook for sports fans searching for a deeper understanding of the games they watch and the people who play them. Sports Illustrated executive editor and best-selling author L. Jon Wertheim teams up with Tufts psychologist Sam Sommers to take listeners on a wild ride into the inner world of sports. Through the prism of behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology, they reveal the hidden influences and surprising cues that inspire and derail us on the field and in the stands - and, by extension, in corporate boardrooms, office settings, and our daily lives. In this irresistible narrative romp, Wertheim and Sommers usher us from professional football to the NBA to Grand Slam tennis, from the psychology of athletes self-handicapping their performances in the boxing ring or the World Series to an explanation of why even the glimpse of a finish line can lift us beyond ordinary physical limits. They explore why Tom Brady and other starting NFL quarterbacks all seem to look like fashion models; why fans of teams like the Cubs, Mets, and any franchise from Cleveland love rooting for a loser; why the best players make the worst coaches; why hockey goons (and fans) would rather fight at home than on the road; and why the arena T-shirt cannon has something to teach us about human nature. This Is Your Brain on Sports is an entertaining and thought-provoking journey into how psychology and behavioral science collide with the universe of wins and losses, coaching changes, underdogs, and rivalry games.
©2011 L. Jon Wertheim (P)2016 Random House Audio
Storms of Victory
Summary
The adventure begun in Janissaries continues. Kidnapped from Earth as they were about to die in battle, Rick Galloway and his band of mercenaries, like the other human slaves on the planet Tran, will not be missed. Subjects of the Shalnuksi slave masters, they are forced to harvest the priceless drug surinomaz. Now, even as slaves, Earth's transplanted warriors are locked in battle - against one another. But an epoch is ending. As the Demon Star sweeps toward its devastating apex, the slave masters flee the planet to await its annihilation in safety. Soon all life on the planet will cease, leaving it ripe for repopulation.
©2014 Dennis Palumbo (P)2014 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
The Nomad Series: Nomad & Sanctuary
Summary
Best-selling author Matthew Mather presents the first two books in the Nomad series, now available in a single audiobook collection. Nomad When exoplanet researcher Dr. Ben Rollins is told by NASA that a massive object in space could end the world, his first instinct is to call his daughter and wife: something is coming, he tells them. We can’t see it, we don’t know what it is, but it’s there. They’re calling it Nomad, and it’s coming fast. The world erupts into chaos as the end approaches - and Ben discovers that his wife and daughter are trapped. The key to humanity’s survival may rest in the answers he pieces together, in the midst of his frantic scramble to find his family before Nomad swallows the planet. Sanctuary In the Day of the Nomad, oceans flooded the continents and the earth split open, pouring darkness into the skies. Jessica Rollins survived, but at what cost? The key to humanity’s survival may lie in the backpack she recovered from her father, in data he collected more than 30 years before. Her father’s words circle around and around in her head. What does the data mean? Who is the mysterious Ufuk Erdogmus? And what is...Sanctuary?
©2020 Matthew Mather (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Face Me When You Walk Away
Summary
After his release from a Siberian gulag, a Soviet negotiator discovers that freedom in Russia can be just as dangerous as imprisonmentJosef Bultova nearly died in a Russian prison camp. Once one of the Soviet Union’s most adept international negotiators, his work with the West grew so intimate that the suspicious Politburo exiled him to Siberia. The meager food, heavy work, and bitter cold took its toll, sapping his strength until, just as he was sure he could no longer go on, the Politburo let him go. Now Josef has a new assignment: shepherding a provincial Russian author whose evocative portrayals of life in the impoverished countryside have him on the shortlist for the Nobel Prize. Josef’s task is to ensure that the author wins the prize—whatever the cost. But as Moscow watches his every move, Josef realizes that he may not have escaped the gulag after all.
©1998 Harry Asher (P)2012 Audible, Inc.
Incinerator
Summary
Edgar and Macavity Award nominee Timothy Hallinan's novels featuring erudite Los Angeles private eye Simeon Grist have become cult favorites - and this fourth installment is one wild ride. Simeon Grist is about to face off against his most terrifying adversary - a madman who's setting fire to the homeless. As Simeon is drawn into the case, very much against his will, he realizes that the "Incinerator" has a huge advantage. Somewhere, years ago, the two of them met, and the Incinerator has been nursing hatred and resentment for years. Now, as helpless people burst into flame on Skid Row, Simeon has to scour the wastelands of Los Angeles, and his own past, looking for the face of a killer.
©2015 Timothy Hallinan (P)2015 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Skinflick
Summary
Now working freelance, Dave Brandstetter digs into an evangelist's secret life. His father's death left Dave Brandstetter with a hole in his heart and an inheritance in his bank account. The money allowed him to venture out on his own, launching a freelance insurance investigation agency that specializes in suspicious deaths. His first case is potentially explosive, and if he isn't careful, it could be his last. Crusading evangelist Gerald Dawson believes that piety and violence go hand-in-hand. To clean up his local skid row, he has taken to vigilante justice, ransacking pornography shops and intimidating their owners. When Gerald is found with his neck snapped, the police finger smut peddler Lon Tooker for the crime, but Dave disagrees. As he digs into the holy man's nighttime activities, he finds a collection of sins that would make even the devil blush.
©1979 Joseph Hansen (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.