Theo Holland has narrated 32 audiobooks on Listento.it by 20 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 2 ratings. The most-rated is Resume Speed and Other Stories.
Resume Speed and Other Stories
Summary
Lawrence Block's new collection assembles seven works of fiction produced over a period of 60 years. "Hard Sell", a story ghost-written under Craig Rice's name, appeared in the first issue of Ed McBain's Mystery Magazine in 1960. It features Rice's hard-drinking yet clear-thinking lawyer, John J.Malone. "Dead to the World", which appeared under a one-shot pen name in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, has been lost for years, and the story of how it was lost and found is as interesting as the story itself. The same is true of "Whatever It Takes", created over a quarter of a century ago and never submitted anywhere, because the author filed it away and forgot about it; he came upon it, dusted it off, and sent it to AHMM where it was published. "I Know How to Pick 'Em" was created for Dangerous Women, the George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois anthology, and a holdback clause in the contract kept it out of LB's previous collections. "Autumn at the Automat" was also created for an anthology, LB's own In Sunlight or in Shadow, and won an Edgar Allan Poe award as "Best Story of the Year". "Gym Rat" has never appeared in print; it was ePublished as part of a Center for Fiction project. While fans have suggested the protagonist might return for further appearances, LB is doubtful. Still, he's been mistaken before. "Resume Speed", the title novella, was published in hardcover (by the stellar Subterranean Press) and as a Kindle single (by the author). Subterranean's edition is out-of-print and hard to come by, and the story now appears in paperback for the first time. While it was created only a couple of years ago, it has its roots in a story the author overheard perhaps 40 years ago. All of the circumstances of its origin, and a good deal more about each of these stories, may be found in LB's foreword. But, if you don't care, you can just skip it and go straight to the stories!
©2018 Lawrence Block (P)2018 Lawrence Block
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Summary
Mark Twain's masterpiece of juvenile literature, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Published by Theo Holland.
Public Domain (P)2020 Theo Lee Holland Jr.
Betrayals
Summary
A compelling political conspiracy mystery thriller heralds the return of FBI star agent Jack Del Rio, who is perhaps the only man in America who can stop the strings of assassinations and conspiracies that threaten to topple the entire government administration and bring the United States under the thumb of evil dictatorship.
Unable to trust even his closest friends and allies in the Bureau, Jack must first survive multiple attempts on his own life then sort out the evildoers who have wormed their way into top positions and do this in time to save the President of the United States - who may just be one of the conspirators himself. It's a race to the finish and the devil takes the hindmost.
©2017 Richard Paolinelli (P)2018 Richard Paolinelli
Me Tanner, You Jane
Summary
It's a jungle out there. Literally. At least for Evan Tanner, an eternally sleepless, sometime superspy, who finds himself in Africa on the trail of the AWOL ruler of tiny Modonoland. It seems the petty despot's gone missing, and he's taken the state treasury along with him. No stranger to impossible missions and international peril, Tanner's been in over his head before. This time, however, he's in imminent danger of being buried alive. And it all has to do with the CIA, white supremacists, moderate revolutionaries...and a blond jungle bombshell named (no joke!) Sheena. Tanner's always been a sucker for a pretty face and a curvaceous body, especially one that's wrapped in leopard skin. But this red-hot renegade daughter of a local missionary is a man-eater. Which means this time Tanner's goose is well and truly cooked.
©2009 Lawrence Block (P)2019 Lawrence Block
The Cooper Saga 11 (Stories 101-110)
Summary
The Matt Complete Cooper series consists of a total of 202 short stories to date. They are all available here on Amazon. All the stories combined would make the file too large, so I broke the collection down into groups of 10 stories each.
©2015 Bill Bernico (P)2016 Bill Bemico
Space Force
Summary
Tenere Altum. Hold the High Ground. These are the stories of the first 100 years of the United States Space Force created by then US President Donald J. Trump. Within this new anthology of military sci-fi short stories, you will find stories of service and incredible sacrifice. Stories of the one sacrificing a few to save the many, and of the one sacrificing himself for all. But mostly these are tales of the men and women to come, who will patrol the harsh, cold blackness of space. Those that willingly place themselves in harm's way to protect a solitary blue marble and all that call it home. Tenere Altum!
©2020 Richard Paolinelli (P)2021 Richard Paolinelli
Tanner's Twelve Swingers
Summary
Presenting Evan Tanner - the first series character created by Lawrence Block, best-selling author of A Walk Among the Tombstones... Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge. And, most importantly, time to do his dreaming while he's wide awake. Karlis, Tanner's comrade in the Latvian Army in Exile, is pining for his true love, a gymnast who can't get out of the Soviet Union. So Tanner sneaks through a hole in the Iron Curtain, meets the child he unwittingly fathered on an earlier trip to Macedonia, smuggles a dissident intellectual out of Yugoslavia, adds to his retinue a six-year-old Lithuanian girl, who'd be the rightful heir to the Lithuanian throne if there ever were one, and winds up not with one Latvian gymnast but with a whole company of them. (Collect them all! Win valuable prizes!) And he does all this without a passport. Oh, he had one, but he gave it away...
©2016 Lawrence Block (P)2017 Lawrence Block
Tanner's Virgin
Summary
Presenting Evan Tanner - the first series character created by Lawrence Block, best-selling author of A Walk Among the Tombstones. Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge. And, most important, time to do his dreaming while he's wide awake. Phaedra Harrow, nee Deborah Horowitz, is an occasional companion of Tanner's, albeit a determined virgin. She goes off on a bargain-priced world tour - and Tanner later learns that the tour's a bargain for a reason: the London-based wanker-in-chief accepts only unattached female travelers, takes them halfway around the world to Afghanistan, and cheerfully sells them into white slavery. Next thing you know Tanner's on his way to pre-Taliban Kabul, where, you won't be surprised to learn, many interesting things happen. And that's just the beginning... Tanner's Virgin was originally published as Here Comes a Hero, the title supplied by some ninny at Fawcett. What were they thinking? Anyway, here it is, back again in all its glory...
©1968, 2016 Lawrence Block (P)2018 Lawrence Block
Resume Speed
Summary
From the legendary author of A Walk Among the Tombstones comes this gripping tale of sudden endings and new beginnings. When a man called Bill spots a sign in a restaurant window, he grabs his carry-on and gets off his bus. Within an hour he's got himself a job as a short-order cook, and a start on a whole new life in Cross Creek, Montana. Things just fall into place. He applies for a library card, and the next thing you know he's having dinner with the librarian. One thing leads to another, and he can see a whole new life stretching out before him.
©2016 Lawrence Block (P)2016 Lawrence Block
Serenity
Summary
A woman dies in his arms...a drug dealer offers him $10,000...a gunman is determined to kill him. And then everything went to hell. Shelby Alexander is an aging ex-boxer and retired fixer whose activities often flirted with the wrong side of the law. Looking for a little peace and a slower pace of life, he moved to Serenity, the small Michigan town where he grew up. But trouble follows men like Shelby, and he finds himself embroiled in an underworld of drugs and violence that may prove to be his undoing. It seemed so simple: 10 grand to ask a few questions. He should have known money complicates everything, especially when the infamous Ellis family is involved, and when a small army of downstate dealers and a shadowy gunman all turn their sights on him, Shelby decides things have gone far enough. And he won't let the law stand in his way. The first book in the new Shelby Alexander Thriller series, Serenity is an action-packed audiobook with a lovingly rendered cast, witty dialogue, and a main character who doesn't know when to quit.
©2016 Craig A. Hart (P)2016 Craig A. Hart
Reservations
Summary
Reservations, a mystery/thriller, is set near Gallup, New Mexico where the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni reservations are adjacent.
Three tribal leaders have been murdered - murdered in a fashion that suggests the deeds were carried out by the COYOTE, a legendary evil trickster feared by many Native Americans. The tribal president contacts his old friend in the FBI for assistance in solving the crimes and preventing more murders.
The FBI selects its star agent, Jack Del Rio, and dispatches him to New Mexico. Del Rio finds a situation tangled in political intrigue, and must work through those issues on his way to solving the mystery. Assisting him in his quest is Officer Lucy Chee. A romantic interest develops between the two. Del Rio identifies the murderer, but not without further bloodshed and loss.
Richard Paolinelli is an author and award-winning sportswriter and editor. His first fiction credit, working on the 1986 graphic novel series, Seadragon, preceded a 25-year newspaper career. After retiring, Richard has returned to fiction writing with two short stories, "Legacy of Death" and "The Invited", as well as a science fiction novel, Maelstrom. When not writing, he and his wife are usually spoiling their grandchild. You can visit him at www.richardpaolinelli.com
©2017 Richard Paolinelli (P)2018 Richard Paolinelli
Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man
Summary
"This is either the funniest dirty book or the dirtiest funny book ever written!" (Isaac Asimov) Somewhere around 1969, I began to grow dissatisfied with the underlying principle of most novels - that a disembodied voice in the first or third person was telling us a story. I liked the idea of novels passing themselves off as documents and drew inspiration from Mark Harris's Wake Up, Stupid and Sue Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife, the first, ostensibly a collection of letters, the second, duh, a diary. (One could, of course, go back further, to the very beginnings of the English novel in the works of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson.) I also found myself interested in writing with greater candor about sexual topics. I had knocked out dozens of soft-core paperbacks, and wanted to try anew with greater freedom and more realism. I wrote three paperback original novels for Berkley under the pen name Jill Emerson, two of them in diary form, the third a presumed collaborative novel written in concert by the three viewpoint characters. These were fun to do and worked out well, and they led to Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man. I riffed on the experience of my friend George Dickerson, who, like the novel's protagonist, had the magazine he was editing folded out from under him. George went on reporting to his empty office for several months, until they found him out when they noticed he'd stopped using his expense account. A man of many talents, George went on to serve as a reporter for Time Magazine for several years, then segued into a career as an actor; he had a principal role in Blue Velvet.) I spliced in an experience of my own, when I drank for hours at the Kettle of Fish on Macdougal Street, emerging only to be picked up by a carful of rich Catholic schoolgirls from the Academy of the Sacred Heart in Noroton, Connecticut, who essentially kidnapped me and drove me back to school with them. These things happen. I wrote the book in four furious days in an apartment on West 35th Street. I did so, thinking it would be another pseudonymous paperback, and that no doubt gave me the freedom to write it as I did; after it was written, the friends who read it liked it so much that I was persuaded to publish it as a hardcover novel, and under my own name. My agent sent it to Bernard Geis, a quirky publisher whose editor - Don Preston - loved the book. Bernie had offices on two floors in midtown Manhattan, and had installed a fireman's pole in case one wanted to get from 9 to 8 in a hurry. All I recall of Don is he told me to avoid seeing Carnal Knowledge, which he hated, and that I must hurry to see McCabe and Mrs.Miller, which he loved. Once I'd managed to sit through McCabe and Mrs. Miller, I knew I'd love Carnal Knowledge. Around the time the story was published, Bernard Geis slid into chapter 11. I can't think this had a salutary effect on sales. Martin Levin in The New York Times book review pointed out that the book was written in the form of a series of letters, which was also the case with Richardson's Pamela, generally acknowledged to be the first English novel. And that, Mr. Levin said, was as much as he had to say on the subject. Well, that's fair. I had the publisher send a copy to Isaac Asimov, whom I'd met a few times over the years. "That's either the funniest dirty book or the dirtiest funny book I've ever read," Isaac told me. "That would make a wonderful blurb," I said. "Over my dead body," he replied. Well, okay. Isaac's been gone over 25 years now, and while I wish he were still around, he's not. And so, I'll just remember him fondly, and thank him for giving Ronald Rabbit Is a Dirty Old Man a helping hand, all these years later.
©1971, 2015 Lawrence Block (P)2020 Lawrence Block
Shelby Alexander Thriller Series: Books 1-4
Summary
You don't lead a life full of action and close scrapes without making a few enemies. This is the hard lesson ex-boxer and retired fixer Shelby Alexander learns when he travels to his boyhood town in northern Michigan to "settle down". As it happens, the bad guys have other ideas. This explosive four-book collection is a roller-coaster ride filled with drama, innuendos, twists and turns, secrets, and betrayal, and a bombshell ending that will leave you spinning. Throughout this pulse-pounding series, Shelby faces enemies both old and new, relying on the skills he's learned over the years to stay alive and bring his own brand of vigilante justice to the bad guys. Full of blazing action, close calls, and memorable characters, the Shelby Alexander series is one you'll want to listen to, again and again.
©2019 Craig A. Hart (P)2019 Craig A. Hart
The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep
Summary
Introducing Evan Tanner - the first series character created by Lawrence Block, best-selling author of A Walk Among the Tombstones... Ever since a shred of shrapnel did a number on his brain's sleep center, Even Tanner has been awake 24/7. This gives him more time than your average underachiever. Time to learn the world's languages (he's fluent in Basque, but has trouble with Chinese). Time to embrace the world's lost causes and irredentist movements (The Flat Earth Society, the League for the Restoration of Cilician Armenia, the Society of the Left Hand). Time to write term papers theses for students with more money than knowledge. And, most important, time to do his dreaming while he's wide awake. The Thief Who Couldn't Sleep is Tanner's first adventure. It finds our insomniacal hero on a mission to recover a hoard of gold coins, stashed 50 years ago in a house in Balekesir by the city's Armenian community. Promptly jailed by the Turks, Tanner escapes and plays hopscotch across the map of Europe, pulling strings, slipping across borders, and, almost incidentally, fomenting a revolution in Macedonia. Well, these things happen...
©1966 Lawrence Block (P)2017 Lawrence Block
Serenity Engulfed
Summary
When Shelby's daughter, Leslie, fails to show up at his cabin for her long-planned visit to northern Michigan, he's concerned, but makes excuses. When her car is found abandoned by the side of a tree-lined highway, he fears the worst. When her cellphone appears on his front porch, he knows something terrible has happened and that he is to blame. Enlisting the help of the new county sheriff, Shelby launches a search for Leslie, all the while dealing with a prostitute in fear for her life, a sexy writer interested in writing his life story, and the long-banished ghosts of his own past. Familiar enemies resurface in this blazing new thriller that finds Shelby racing against time to save the most important person in his life: his own child.
©2018 Craig A. Hart (P)2019 Craig A. Hart
Serenity Avenged
Summary
A ruthless crime boss...a mansion with a chilling secret...a young man faced with the biggest decision of his life. When his daughter goes into premature labor, Shelby Alexander leaves his northern hideaway for downstate. No sooner does he drive into town that things go sour. His ex-wife, Helen, faces deadly consequences after hard times force her to take desperate measures, setting off a dangerous chain of events. Racing against time to save those he loves the most and avoid unspeakable tragedy, Shelby faces down an evil crime lord, trained killers, and one of the closest brushes with death yet. The third book in the popular Shelby Alexander Thriller Series, Serenity Avenged takes listeners on a breath-taking ride through a hail of bullets, close calls, and betrayal.
©2017 Craig A. Hart (P)2017 Craig A. Hart
McHugh
Summary
The 1960s' toughest, brainiest, sexiest, and most compassionate spy, is back in print!
Meet McHugh America's#1 Secret Agent a combination of Mickey Spillaine's Mike Hammer and Ian Flemming's James Bond. Like 007, he has an ultra-sophisticated taste for the finest liquors, food, cars, ladies, and hand-tailored suits. Like Hammer he can pound the toughest thugs teeth in with a single punch, bounce back from the most vicious beatings, carries the biggest hand gun around, and isn't slow to use it, and has the most extraordinary gal pal ever.
In this first book in the series, McHugh takes a leave of absence from his spy work to help out his lover's sister who has found a dead Mafioso in her apartment, her boyfriend missing, and half San Francisco's mobsters after her.
But soon, the twisting trail leads back to his home base, and he finds the case involves not only the Cosa Nostra but has a government aspect as well and is ordered back in service by the General who commands his loyalty. Foreign killers, Mafia Killers, it's a killer of a plot involving millions of dollars in stolen gold, international smugglers, and enough shootouts to send 007 screaming into retirement and frighten Hammer into surrendering his PI license. And then there is Loris. What can we say about Loris? You will have to listen about her for yourself. Move over Velda. Make room Moneypenny. There has never been a woman like Loris before. Or a hero like McHugh. You won't be able to wait for his other adventures. They are espionage classics from the Golden Age of the '60s!
©2019 Deerstalker Mysteries (P)2019 Deerstalker Mysteries
Serenity Betrayed
Summary
After the governor of Michigan begins receiving threats from a militant environmental group, he calls in extra security. The problem? He fears there might be a traitor on his security detail. The solution? Call in an independent contractor. The man for the job? An ex-boxer and semi-retired fixer named Shelby Alexander. But who can be trusted? As it turns out, no one. Along with his best buddy and right-hand man Jerry "Mack" MacIntyre, Shelby steps in to protect the governor of his beloved state. It doesn't take long for the fireworks to start and the betrayals to run thick and heavy. Don't miss this roller-coaster ride of danger, action, and high stakes treachery!
©2018 Craig A. Hart (P)2020 Craig A. Hart
Serenity Submerged
Summary
A mysterious woman knocks on Shelby's door. A secret lies submerged at the bottom of a lake. And someone close to Shelby is going to die. A woman claiming to be an FBI agent appears on Shelby's doorstep and hands him a picture, asking if he recognizes the man in the photo. Shelby is shocked to see the face of a good friend staring back at him. Little does Shelby know, the woman isn't the only predator on the prowl. A group of hired killers has rolled into Serenity with one thing on their minds: death. And it's up to Shelby to make sure the bullets fly in the right direction. Action drips in Serenity Submerged, the fourth heart-pounding addition to the Shelby Alexander Thriller Series. Relationships are questioned, secrets are revealed, and no one is quite who they seem. Serenity will never be the same.
©2017 Craig A. Hart (P)2018 Craig A. Hart
Rogue Wave
Summary
From Amazon Number 1 best-selling author, David F. Berens. Back from his tour in Afghanistan, Troy Clint Bodean had everything he needed for some peace and quiet: a good fishing pole, a pickup truck, and a beach house on a small island in South Carolina. All was right with the world - until he found the hat. It was a straw cowboy hat with a peacock feather stuck in the band and it looked good on him, really good. That's when everyone started trying to kill him, and he had no idea why. Hold on to your hat! Suspenseful, gripping, and fast-paced, Hat Check - the first Troy Bodean Adventure - follows Troy trying desperately to stay alive and figure out why everyone is out to get him. Readers of Carl Hiaasen, Randy Wayne White, and Tim Dorsey will love the island feel and snappy humor of Hat Check.
©2017 David F. Berens (P)2017 David F. Berens