Will Patton has narrated 95 audiobooks on Listento.it by 47 authors, with an average listener rating of 4.6★ across 12,004 ratings. The most-rated is The Outsider.
Rain Gods
Summary
When Hackberry Holland became sheriff of a tiny Texas town near the Mexican border, he'd hoped to leave certain things behind: his checkered reputation, his haunted dreams, and his obsessive memories of the good life with his late wife, Rie. But the discovery of the bodies of nine illegal aliens, machine-gunned to death and buried in a shallow grave behind a church, soon makes it clear that he won't escape so easily. As Hack and Deputy Sheriff Pam Tibbs attempt to untangle the threads of this complex and grisly case, a damaged young Iraq veteran, Pete Flores, and his girlfriend, Vikki Gaddis, are running for their lives, hoping to outwit the bloodthirsty criminals who want to kill Pete for his involvement in the murders. The only trouble is, Pete doesn't know who he's running from: drunk and terrified, he fled the scene of the crime when the shooting began. And there's a long list of people who want Pete and Vikki dead: crime boss Hugo Cistranos, who hired Pete for the operation; Nick Dolan, a strip club owner and small-time gangster with revenge on his mind; and a mysterious God-fearing serial-killer-for-hire known as Preacher Jack Collins, with enigmatic motives of his own. With the FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and a host of cold-blooded killers on Pete and Vikki's trail, it's up to Sheriff Holland to find them first and figure out who's behind the mass murder before anyone else ends up dead. In this thrilling and intricate work, James Lee Burke has once again proven himself a master storyteller and a perceptive chronicler of the darkest corners of the human heart.
©2009 James Lee Burke (P)2009 Simon & Schuster Audio
Lay Down My Sword and Shield
Summary
The hero of James Lee Burke's recent best-seller Rain Gods, cousin to lawman Billy Bob Holland and a genuine product of the South, both old and new, Hackberry Holland makes his first appearance in this early gem from "America's best novelist" (The Denver Post). Against the backdrop of growing civil rights turmoil in a sultry border town, the hard-drinking ex-POW attorney yields to the myriad urgings of his wife, his brother, and his so-called friends to make a bid for a congressional seat - and finds himself embroiled in the seamy world of Texas powerbrokers. And when Hack attempts to overturn an old army buddy's conviction, and crosses paths with a beautiful union organizer who speaks to his heart in a way no one else has, he finds both a new love and a new purpose as he breaks free from the shackles of wealth and expectation to bring justice to the underserved.
©2010 James Lee Burke (P)2010 Simon & Schuster
The Broken Ones
Summary
Prequel to the USA Today best-selling and Goodreads Choice finalist Stolen Songbird. Below Forsaken Mountain, a plot is being hatched to overthrow the tyrant king of Trollus, and Marc is the right-hand man of its leader. His involvement is information more than one troll would kill to possess, which is why he must keep it a secret from everyone, even the girl he loves. After accidentally ruining her sister's chance to become queen, Pénélope is given one last opportunity by her father, the Duke d'Angoulême, to make herself useful: she must find proof that the boy she's in love with is conspiring against the crown. If she fails, her life will be forfeit. Marc and Pénélope must navigate the complex politics of Trollus, where powers on all sides are intent on using them as pawns, forcing them to risk everything for a chance at a life together. Except being together may turn out to be the greatest risk of all.
©2017 Danielle L. Jensen (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
The White Darkness
Summary
By the number one New York Times best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon, a powerful true story of adventure and obsession in the Antarctic Henry Worsley was a devoted husband and father and a decorated British special forces officer who believed in honor and sacrifice. He was also a man obsessed. He spent his life idolizing Ernest Shackleton, the 19th-century polar explorer, who tried to become the first person to reach the South Pole, and later sought to cross Antarctica on foot. Shackleton never completed his journeys, but he repeatedly rescued his men from certain death, and emerged as one of the greatest leaders in history. Worsley felt an overpowering connection to those expeditions. He was related to one of Shackleton's men, Frank Worsley, and spent a fortune collecting artifacts from their epic treks across the continent. He modeled his military command on Shackleton's legendary skills and was determined to measure his own powers of endurance against them. He would succeed where Shackleton had failed, in the most brutal landscape in the world. In 2008, Worsley set out across Antarctica with two other descendants of Shackleton's crew, battling the freezing, desolate landscape, life-threatening physical exhaustion, and hidden crevasses. Yet when he returned home, he felt compelled to go back. On November 13, 2015, at age 55, Worsley bid farewell to his family and embarked on his most perilous quest: to walk across Antarctica alone. David Grann tells Worsley's remarkable story with the intensity and power that have led him to be called "simply the best narrative nonfiction writer working today." The White Darkness is both a gorgeous keepsake volume and a spellbinding story of courage, love, and a man pushing himself to the extremes of human capacity.
©2018 David Grann (P)2018 Random House Audio
Train Dreams
Summary
Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams is an epic in miniature, one of his most evocative and poignant fictions. Robert Grainer is a day laborer in the American West at the start of the 20th century—an ordinary man in extraordinary times. Buffeted by the loss of his family, Grainer struggles to make sense of this strange new world. As his story unfolds, we witness both his shocking personal defeats and the radical changes that transform America in his lifetime. Suffused with the history and landscapes of the American West—its otherworldly flora and fauna, its rugged loggers and bridge builders—the new novella by the National Book Award-winning author of Tree of Smoke captures the disappearance of a distinctly American way of life.
©2002 Denis Johnson (P)2011 Macmillan Audio
Thirteen Moons
Summary
This magnificent novel by one of America's finest writers is the epic of one man's remarkable journey, set in 19th-century America against the background of a vanishing people and a rich way of life. At the age of 12, under the Wind moon, Will is given a horse, a key, and a map, and sent alone into the Indian Nation to run a trading post as a bound boy. It is during this time that he grows into a man, learning, as he does, of the raw power it takes to create a life, to find a home. In a card game with a white Indian named Featherstone, Will wins - for a brief moment - a mysterious girl named Claire, and his passion and desire for her spans this novel. As Will's destiny intertwines with the fate of the Cherokee Indians - including a Cherokee chief named Bear - he learns how to fight and survive in the face of both nature and man. Eventually, under the Corn Tassel Moon, Will begins the fight against Washington to preserve the Cherokee's homeland and culture. And he will come to know the truth behind his belief that "only desire trumps time". Brilliantly imagined, written with great power and beauty by a master of American fiction, Thirteen Moons is a stunning novel about a man's passion for a woman, and how loss, longing, and love can shape a man's destiny over the many moons of a life.
©2006 3 Crows Corporation (P)2006 Random House, Inc.
Nightwoods
Summary
The extraordinary author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons returns with a dazzling new novel of suspense and love set in small-town North Carolina in the early 1960s. Charles Frazier puts his remarkable gifts in the service of a lean, taut narrative while losing none of the transcendent prose, virtuosic storytelling, and insight into human nature that have made him one of the most beloved and celebrated authors in the world. Now, with his brilliant portrait of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins, Frazier has created his most memorable heroine. Before the children, Luce was content with the reimbursements of the rich Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the small community around her. But the coming of the children changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful, dangerous ways. Charles Frazier is known for his historical literary odysseys, and for making figures in the past come vividly to life. Set in the 20th century, Nightwoods resonates with the timelessness of a great work of art.
©2011 Charles Frazier (P)2011 Random House Audio
Pegasus Descending
Summary
A troubled young woman breezes into Detective Robicheaux's hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana. She happens to be the daughter of his friend: a friend he witnessed gunned down in a bank robbery, a tragedy that forever changed Robicheaux's life. The twists begin when Trish Klein, the only offspring of Robicheaux's Vietnam-era buddy, starts passing marked hundred-dollar bills in local casinos. Is she a good kid gone bad? A victim's child seeking revenge? A promiscuous beauty seducing everyone good within her grasp? And can Robicheaux make peace with his friend's murder in time to figure out how a local mobster fits into all the schemes and death? Will his life be whole again when it has been shattered by so much tragedy? In Pegasus Descending, James Lee Burke explores psyches as much as evidence, and tries to make sense of human behavior as well as his characters' crimes. Richly atmospheric, frightening in its sudden violence, and replete with the sort of puzzles only the best crime fiction creates, Burke's latest novel is an unforgettable roller coaster of passion, surprise, and regret.
©2006 James Lee Burke. All rights reserved (P)2006 Simon & Schuster. All rights reserved.
Feast Day of Fools
Summary
Celebrated crime master and two-time Edgar Award winner James Lee Burke returns with a gorgeously crafted, brutally resonant chronicle of violence along the Texas-Mexico border. Sheriff Hackberry Holland patrols a small Southwest Texas border town, meting out punishment and delivering justice in his small square of this magnificent but lawless land. When an alcoholic ex-boxer named Danny Boy Lorca begs to be locked up after witnessing a man tortured to death by a group of bandits, Hack and his deputy, Pam Tibbs, slowly extract the Indian man’s gruesome tale. It becomes clear that the desert contains a multitude of criminals, including serial murderer Preacher Jack Collins (whom The New York Times called “one of Burke’s most inspired villains”). Holland’s investigation leads him to Anton Ling, a mysterious Chinese woman whose steely demeanor and aristocratic beauty compel Hackberry to return to her home again and again as the investigation unfolds. James Lee Burke is at his engrossing and atmospheric best in this, his 13th novel, as Hackberry plumbs the depths of man’s inhumanity to man - from killers-for-hire, to the U.S. government, to the misguided souls in search of a better life across the border.
©2011 James Lee Burke (P)2011 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.
Heaven's Prisoners
Summary
Vietnam vet Dave Robicheaux has turned in his detective's badge, is winning his battle against booze, and has left New Orleans with his wife for the tranquil beauty of the Louisiana bayou. But a plane crash on the Gulf brings a young girl into his life - and with her comes a netherworld of murder, deception and homegrown crime. Suddenly Robicheaux is confronting Bubba Rocque, a brutal hood he's known since childhood, Rocque's hungry Cajun wife, and a Federal agent with more guts than sense. In a backwater world where a swagger and a gun go further than the law, Robicheaux and those he loves are caught on a tide of violence far bigger than them all.
©1996 James Lee Burke (P)1996 Simon & Schuster Inc., AUDIOWORKS Is an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster Inc.
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Summary
Twenty-five years after Jesus’ Son, a haunting new collection of short stories on mortality and transcendence, from National Book Award winner and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Denis Johnson The Largesse of the Sea Maiden is the long-awaited new story collection from Denis Johnson. Written in the luminous prose that made him one of the most beloved and important writers of his generation, this collection finds Johnson in new territory, contemplating the ghosts of the past and the elusive and unexpected ways the mysteries of the universe assert themselves. Finished shortly before Johnson’s death, this collection is the last word from a writer whose work will live on for many years to come. Audiobook Table of Contents: “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden”, read by Nick Offerman “The Starlight on Idaho”, read by Michael Shannon “Strangler Bob”, read by Dermot Mulroney “Triumph over the Grave”, read by Will Patton “Doppelgänger, Poltergeist”, read by Liev Schreiber Advance praise for The Largesse of the Sea Maiden: “Mesmerizing...psychologically revelatory, spiritually inquisitive, and grimly funny stories...Johnson will be remembered and revered as an incisive storyteller fluent in the comedy and tragedy of human confusion and the transcendence of compassion.” [Booklist (starred review)] “American literature suffered a serious loss with Johnson’s death. These final stories underscore what we’ll miss.... Johnson is best known for his writing about hard-luck cases - alcoholics, thieves, world-weary soldiers. But this final collection ranges up and down the class ladder; for Johnson, a sense of mortality and a struggle to make sense of our lives knew no demographic boundaries.” [Kirkus Reviews (starred review)] “An instant classic... A masterpiece of deep humanity and astonishing prose... It’s filled with Johnson's unparalleled ability to inject humor, profundity, and beauty - often all three - into the dark and the mundane alike. These characters have been pushed toward the edge; through their searches for meaning or clawing just to hold on to life, Johnson is able to articulate what it means to be alive, and to have hope.” (Publishers Weekly)
©2018 Denis Johnson (P)2018 Random House Audio
The Invisible Man
Summary
A mysterious stranger in a long-sleeved coat, with a bandaged face and wide-brimmed hat, arrives in a small English village. But his incongruous appearance is nothing compared to the secret of the clandestine experiments he is undertaking...With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin - the new guest at The Coach and Horses - is at first assumed to be a shy accident-victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible, and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of his old friend Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however - and when Kemp refuses to help, Griffin resolves to wreak his revenge. About The Narrator: John Banks is one of the UK's most prolific audiobook narrators, working for the likes of Big Finish, Audible, Random House and Games Workshop. He is a true multi-voice, creating everything from monsters to marauding aliens. He is also an accomplished stage and TV actor. Herbert George Wells was a novelist, teacher, historian and journalist, who has become known as the "father of science fiction." His works have been adapted countless times, and provided the basis for many literary and theatrical productions.
©2017 Fantom Films (P)2017 Spokenworld Audio & Ladbroke Audio Ltd/Fantom Publishing
Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Summary
"He loads his head full of coal and diamonds shoot out of his finger tips. What a trick. The mole genius has left us with another digest. It's a full house - read 'em and weep." - Tom Waits Born from Bukowski's columns, the LA underground press of the 1960s, Bukowski defined his early alter ego, Hank Chinaski, as a self-described dirty old man who eyes his defeatist attitude about himself with his clarity to see humor and holiness in others. Addictive and instructive listening, Bukowski delivers the humanity and intelligence of all the unseen. Filled with his usual obsessions - sex, booze, gambling - Notes features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, and his tortured, violent relationships. "People come to my door - too many of them really - and knock to tell me Notes of a Dirty Old Man turns them on. A bum off the road brings in a gypsy and his wife and we talk...drink half the night. A long distance operator from Newburgh, N.Y. sends me money. She wants me to give up drinking beer and to eat well. I hear from a madman who calls himself 'King Arthur' and lives on Vine Street in Hollywood and wants to help me write my column. A doctor comes to my door: 'I read your column and think I can help you. I used to be a psychiatrist.' I send him away...." "Bukowski writes like a latter-day Celine, a wise fool talking straight from the gut about the futility and beauty of life...." (Publishers Weekly) OBIE winner Will Patton (Remember the Titans, The Good Wife, Armageddon) recreates Bukowski in his visceral prime, along with every eye-popping character in his life, each adversary, lover, and stranger in a lost city. More about the author: Charles Bukowski is one of America's best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose, and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in Andernach, Germany and raised in Los Angeles, where he lived for 50 years. He published his first story in 1944, when he was 24, and began writing poetry at the age of 35. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of 73, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.
©1969 Charles Bukowski (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Light of the World
Summary
"America’s best novelist" (The Denver Post) and "the reigning champ of nostalgia noir" (The New York Times Book Review) introduces his most evil character yet in the 20th thriller in the best-selling Dave Robicheaux series. A New York Times best-selling author many times over, James Lee Burke is a two-time Edgar Award-winner whose every book is cause for excitement, especially those in the wildly popular Dave Robicheaux series. In Light of the World, sadist and serial killer Asa Surrette narrowly escaped the death penalty for the string of heinous murders he committed while capital punishment was outlawed in Kansas. But following a series of damning articles written by Dave Robicheaux’s daughter Alafair about possible other crimes committed by Surette, the killer escapes from a prison transport van and heads to Montana - where an unsuspecting Dave happens to have gone to take in the sweet summer air, accompanied by Alafair, his wife Molly, faithful partner Clete, and Clete’s newfound daughter, Gretchen Horowitz, whom listeners met in Burke’s most recent best seller Creole Belle. "James Lee Burke remains the heavy weight champ," says New York Times best-seller Michael Connelly, "a great American novelist whose work...is unsurpassed." The master proves it once again with this harrowing novel that examines the nature of evil and pits Dave Robicheaux against the most diabolical villain he has ever faced.
©2013 James Lee Burke (P)2013 Simon & Schuster
Never Love a Stranger
Summary
Based on a $100 bet with his boss that he couldn't write a novel, Harold Robbins penned his first book, Never Love a Stranger. Not only did Robbins win the bet, the novel became a best seller, was adapted into the classic noir gangster film of the same name starring John Barrymore and Steve McQueen, and launched the career of one of the world's best-selling authors of all time. Never Love a Stranger, still considered one of Robbins' most powerful books, tells the story of Francis "Frankie" Kane, an orphan growing up in the dirty world of New York's Hell's Kitchen. After being kicked out of a Catholic orphanage when it is discovered that he is of Jewish descent, a confused and deeply distraught Frankie turns to a life of crime, the only life he knows, and he's good at it. Frankie quickly makes a name for himself and becomes one of New York's most dangerous men, ruling the city with an iron fist and indulging in his passion for sex, power, and the best things life has to offer - regardless of whether they're for sale. But Frankie's childhood friend, Jerry, grows to become an ambitious, tough-as-nails district attorney - determined to bring Frankie down. In Robbins' writing debut, he takes an unflinching look at the menacing New York of a bygone era when the syndicate ruled without mercy - and the world was introduced to a writer who would influence pop culture worldwide for decades to come. More than 25 New York Times best sellers later - many, like his most famous novel, The Carpetbaggers, reaching the number-one spot - and with over 750 million copies sold to date, Robbins became one of the most successful authors of all time. This is the novel that started it all - giving the world its first taste of Robbins' world of sex, corruption, and intrigue.
©2014 RosettaBooks LLC (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
The Lost Get-Back Boogie
Summary
Called "America's best novelist" by the Denver Post, James Lee Burke is well known for his award-winning Dave Robicheaux series. In this enthralling departure, Burke weaves the tale of Iry Paret. Released from prison after two years for manslaughter, Iry heads to Montana for a fresh start on a ranch owned by a prison buddy's father. He also hopes to nail down a song he's been working on, unable to get quite right. But soon new troubles bring tragic consequences, and it will take a lot more than a soulful tune to ease the pain.
©1986 James Lee Burke (P)2009 Recorded Books, LLC
When Zachary Beaver Came to Town
Summary
Nothing ever happens in Toby's small Texas town. Nothing much until this summer that's full of big changes. It's tough for Toby when his mother leaves home to become a country singer. And Toby takes it hard when his best friend Cal's older brother goes off to fight in Vietnam. But now their sleepy town is about to get an even bigger jolt with the arrival of Zachary Beaver, billed as the fattest boy in the world. Toby is in for a summer unlike any other, a summer sure to change his life.
©1999 Laurie Halse Anderson (P)2000 Random House, Inc. Listening Library, an imprint of the Random House Audio Publishing Group
Two for Texas
Summary
This James Lee Burke novel, featuring Son Holland - the great-grandfather of Burke's Billy Bob Holland - as he flees a Louisiana prison camp with a Native American woman and a fellow prisoner in tow, is now available in audio.
©2000 James Lee Burke (P)2012 Simon & Schuster Audio
Fine Just The Way It Is
Summary
2009 Audie Award Finalist for Short Stories/Collections Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt, National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. "Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief." Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.
©2008 Annie Proulx (P)2008 Simon & Schuster
Tarantula
Summary
Never before on audio! Music legend Bob Dylan’s only work of fiction - a combination of stream-of-consciousness prose, lyrics, and poetry that illuminates the creative process of one of the most influential musicians and songwriters of our time - finally comes to audio in a magnificent performance by award-winning narrator Will Patton! Written in 1966, Tarantula is a collection of poems and prose that evokes the turbulence of its time and provides a unique perspective on Bob Dylan’s creative evolution. It captures Dylan at a crucial juncture in his artistic development, showcasing the imagination of a revolutionary musician who was able to combine the humanity and compassion of his folk music roots with the surrealism of modern art and the intensity of the Delta blues. Angry, funny, and elusive, the poems and prose in this collection reflect the concerns found in Dylan’s most seminal music: a sense of protest, verbal ingenuity and spontaneity, and a belief in the artistic legitimacy of chronicling everyday life and the rhythms of the street and in the air.
©1994 ©1966 Bob Dylan. ©1971 The Macmillan Company. Copyright renewed ©1994 Bob Dylan. All rights reserved. (P)2019 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved. (P)1994 Simon & Schuster Audio