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.
The Most Beautiful Woman in Town
Summary
A short story from The Most Beautiful Woman in Town & Other Stories "Cass was the youngest and most beautiful of 5 sisters. Cass was the most beautiful girl in town. 1/2 Indian with a supple and strange body, a snake-like and fiery body with eyes to go with it. Cass was fluid moving fire. She was like a spirit stuck into a form that would not hold her. Her hair was black and long and silken and whirled about as did her body. Her spirit was either very high or very low. There was no in between for Cass. Some said she was crazy. The dull ones said that. The dull ones would never understand Cass. To the men she was simply a sex machine and they didn't care whether she was crazy or not." Bukowski's alter ego finds himself in a slow dance with the most beautiful girl in town, who also happens to be its saddest; a tale of loss and what might have been. 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.
©1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1983 Charles Bukowski (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
The Tin Roof Blowdown
Summary
Dave Robicheaux returns in another Bayou adventure, this one more gruesome and gut-wrenching than any that have come before. Hurricane Katrina has ravaged New Orleans, leaving the streets and buildings flooded and the city awash with opportunists, looters, and vicious criminals. There is no order, no law. Police are shooting randomly at innocent people, prison guards have abandoned their posts, bodies float through the streets and hang from trees, and every drug dealer, murderer, and rapist is out taking advantage of the desperate lawlessness that holds the city captive. In the midst of it all is Robicheaux, doing his best to help regulate the post-Katrina madness, all the while on a dogged search for a pair of dangerous fugitives, a dope-addicted, fallen priest, and a vigilante insurance salesman who takes his family's protection too far. This promises to be the most taxing and emotional case Robicheaux has had to work. In his singular style, which defies genre, James Lee Burke has created a haunting picture of life in New Orleans after Katrina. Filled with complex characters and vivid descriptions of the destruction and death that gripped the Big Easy, The Tin Roof Blowdown is an action-packed crime thriller as well as a poignant story of what disaster and desperation can do to people.
©2007 James Lee Burke. All rights reserved (P)2007 Simon and Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
Swan Peak
Summary
2009 Audie Award Finalist for Mystery
James Lee Burke's new novel, Swan Peak, finds Detective Robicheaux far from his New Iberia roots, attempting to relax in the untouched wilderness of rural Montana. He, his wife, and his buddy, Clete Purcell, have retreated to stay at an old friend's ranch, hoping to spend their days fishing and enjoying their distance from the harsh, gritty landscape of Louisiana post-Katrina.
But the serenity is soon shattered when two college students are found brutally murdered in the hills behind where the Robicheauxs and Purcell are staying. They quickly find themselves involved in a twisted and dangerous mystery involving a wealthy, vicious oil tycoon, his deformed brother and beautiful wife, a sexually deviant minister, an escaped con and former country-music star, and a vigilante Texas gunbull out for blood.
At the center of the storm is Clete, who cannot shake the feeling that he is being haunted by the ghosts from his past - namely Sally Dio, the mob boss he'd sabotaged and killed years before.
In this expertly drawn, gripping story, Burke deftly weaves intricate, engaging plotlines and original, compelling characters with his uniquely graceful prose. He transcends genre yet again in the latest thrilling addition to his New York Times best-selling series.
©2008 James Lee Burke (P)2008 Simon and Schuster, Inc.
Pegasus Descending
Summary
Detective Dave Robicheaux is facing the most painful and dangerous case of his career. A troubled young woman breezes into his hometown of New Iberia, Louisiana. She happens to be the daughter of Robicheaux's onetime best friend, a friend he witnessed gunned down in a bank robbery, a tragedy that forever changed Robicheaux's life. In Pegasus Descending, James Lee Burke again explores psyches as much as evidence, and tries to make sense of human behavior as well as of 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. 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 how does her behavior relate to the apparent suicide of another "good" girl, an ace student named Yvonne Darbonne, who apparently participated in a college frat orgy before her death? Can Robicheaux make his peace with the demons that have haunted him since his friend's murder so many years ago? Can he figure out how a local mobster fits into all the schemes and deaths? Can Robicheaux's life be whole again when it has been shattered by so much tragedy? Once again, Burke proves why he is the virtual poet laureate of southern Louisiana, and why his novels, especially those featuring Dave Robicheaux, stand as brilliant literature and entertainment for our time.
©2006 James Lee Burke. All rights reserved. (P)2006 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.
The President Has Been Shot!
Summary
A breathtaking and dramatic account of the JFK assassination by the New York Times best-selling author. Swanson transports listeners back to one of the most shocking, sad, and terrifying events in American history. As he did in his best-selling Chasing Lincoln's Killer, he deploys his signature "you are there" style to tell the story of the JFK assassination as it has never been told before.
©2013 James L. Swanson (P)2013 Scholastic, Inc.
Purple Cane Road
Summary
Dave Robicheaux has spent his life confronting the age-old adage that the sins of the father pass on to the son. But what about his mother's legacy? Dead to him since his youth, Mae Guillory has been shuttered away in the deep recesses of Robicheaux's mind. He's lived with the fact that he would never really know what happened to the woman who left him to the devices of a whiskey-driven father. But deep down, Dave still feels the loss of his mother and knows that the infinite series of disappointments in her life could not have come to a good end. While helping out an old friend, Dave is stunned when a pimp looks at him sideways and asks if he is the son of Mae Guillory, the whore a bunch of cops murdered thirty years ago. Her body was dumped in the bayou bordering Purple Cane Road, and the cops who left her there are still on the job. Dave's search for his mother's killer leads him to the darker places in his past, and solving this case teaches him what it means to be his mother's son. Purple Cane Road has the dimensions of a classic - passion, murder, and nearly heartbreaking poignancy - wrapped in a wonderfully executed plot that surprises from start to finish.
©2000 James Lee Burke, All Rights Reserved (P)2000 Simon & Schuster, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Sunset Limited
Summary
The forty-year-old crucifixion of a prominent labor leader named Jack Flynn remains an unsolved atrocity that has never been forgotten in New Iberia, Louisiana. When Flynn's daughter Megan, a photojournalist drawn to controversial subjects, returns to the site of her father's murder, it quickly becomes clear that her family's bloodstained past will not stay buried. Megan gives her old friend Dave Robicheaux a tip about a small-time criminal named Cool Breeze Broussard, scarcely suspecting that the seemingly innocuous case will lead Robicheaux and his partner into the midst of deadly conspiracy. Combining brilliant prose, crackling suspense, and an exquisite sense of character and place, Sunset Limited is a wrenching tale of historic violence and soiled redemption that reveals America's finest novelist at his masterful best.
©1998 James Lee Burke, All Rights Reserved (P)1998 Simon & Schuster Inc., All Rights Reserved, AUDIOWORKS Is an Imprint of Simon & Schuster Audio Division, Simon & Schuster Inc.
Creole Belle
Summary
Dave Robicheaux is back, in a gorgeously written, visceral thriller by James Lee Burke, “the heavy weight champ, a great American novelist whose work, taken individually or as a whole, is unsurpassed” (Michael Connelly). Creole Belle begins where the last book in the Dave Robicheaux series, The Glass Rainbow, ended. Dave is in a recovery unit in New Orleans, where a Creole girl named Tee Jolie Melton visits him and leaves him an iPod with the country blues song "Creole Belle" on it. Then she disappears. Dave becomes obsessed with the song and the memory of Tee Jolie and goes in search of her sister, who later turns up inside a block of ice floating in the Gulf. Meanwhile, there has been an oil well blowout on the Gulf, threatening the cherished environs of the bayous. Creole Belle is James Lee Burke at his very best, with beloved series hero Dave Robicheaux leading the charge against the destruction of both the land and the people he has sworn to protect.
©2012 James Lee Burke (P)2012 Simon & Schuster
More 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 After toiling in obscurity for years, Charles Bukowski suddenly found fame in 1967 with his autobiographical newspaper column, "Notes of a Dirty Old Man", and a book of that name in 1969. He continued writing this column, in one form or another, through the mid-1980s. More Notes of a Dirty Old Man gathers many uncollected gems from the column's 20-year run. Filled with his usual obsessions - sex, booze, gambling - More features Bukowski's offbeat insights into politics and literature, his tortured, violent relationships with women, and his lurid escapades on the poetry reading circuit. Highlighting his versatility, the book ranges from thinly-veiled autobiography to purely fictional tales of dysfunctional suburbanites, disgraced politicians, and down-and-out sports promoters - climaxing with a long, hilarious adventure among French filmmakers, to "My Friend the Gambler", based on his experiences making the movie Barfly. From his lowly days at the post office through his later literary fame, More follows the entire arc of Bukowski's colorful career. 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.
©2011 The Estate of Charles Bukowski (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Boone's Lick
Summary
Boone's Lick is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Larry McMurtry's triumphant return to the kind of story that made him famous - an enthralling tale of the 19th-century West. McMurtry brings his unique blend of historical fact and sheer storytelling genius to the Cecil family's arduous journey from Boone's Lick, Missouri, to Fort Phil Kearny in Wyoming. Fifteen-year-old Shay describes the journey that begins when his Ma, Mary Margaret, decides to hunt down her elusive husband, Dick, to tell him she's leaving him. The family sets out across the plains in search of him, encountering grizzly bears, stormy weather, and hostile Indians as they go. With them are Shay's siblings G.T., Neva, and Baby Marcy, Shay's uncle Seth, his Granpa Crackenthorpe, and Mary Margaret's beautiful half-sister Rose. During their journey they pick up a bare-footed priest named Father Villy, and a Snake Indian named Charlie Seven Days, and persuade them to come along. Boone's Lick is high adventure, a perfect Western tale and a moving love story - it is vintage McMurtry, combining his brilliant character portraits, his unerring sense of the West and his unrivalled eye for the telling detail.
©2000 Larry McMurtry, All Rights Reserved (P)2000 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Nobody Move
Summary
From the National Book Award-winning, best-selling author of Tree of Smoke comes a provocative thriller set in the American West. Nobody Move, which first appeared in the pages of Playboy, is the story of an assortment of lowlifes in Bakersfield, California, and their cat-and-mouse game over $2.3 million. Touched by echoes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, Nobody Move is at once an homage to and a variation on literary form. It salutes one of our most enduring and popular genres - the American crime novel - but does so with a grisly humor and outrageousness that are Denis Johnson's own. Sexy, suspenseful, and above all entertaining, Nobody Move shows one of our greatest novelists at his versatile best.
©2009 Denis Johnson (P)2009 Macmillan Audio
Chasing Lincoln's Killer
Summary
This fast-paced thriller tells the story of the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth and gives a day-by-day account of the wild chase to find this killer and his accomplices. Based on James L. Swanson's best-selling adult book Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer, this version, written especially for young people, is a fascinating look at the assassination of the 16th president of the United States. But there's more to the story. Here, listeners will meet Abraham Lincoln the man, the father, the husband, the friend. And they will get a firsthand sense of t how Lincoln's death impacted those closest to him.
©2009 James L. Swanson (P)2009 Scholastic Inc.
Mister Impossible
Summary
Something is happening to the source of the dreamers' power. It is blocked. Diminished. Weak. If it goes away entirely, what will happen to the dreamers and those who depend on them? Ronan Lynch isn't planning to wait and find out. Backed by his mentor, Bryde, he is ready to do what needs to be done to save the dreamers and the dreamed...even if it takes him far from his family and the boy he loves. Jordan Hennessy knows she will not survive if the dreaming fails. So she plunges into a dark underworld in order to find an object that may sustain her. Carmen Farooq-Lane is afraid of the dreamers - which is why she's agreed to hunt them down. The closer she gets, though, the more complicated her feelings become. Will the dreamers destroy the world...or will the world be destroyed trying to eliminate the dreamers? In the remarkable second book of the Dreamer Trilogy, Maggie Stiefvater pushes her characters to their limits - and shows what happens when they start to break.
©2021 Maggie Stiefvater. (P)2021 Scholastic Inc. All rights reserved.
Tales of Ordinary Madness
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 Inspired by D.H. Lawrence, Chekhov, and Hemingway, Bukowski's writing is passionate and extreme - his life was as weird and wild as the tales he wrote. His first work came from the 1960s Los Angeles underground press, and yet he became regarded as one of one of America's greatest poets and realist novelists. This collection of Buk's grimmest diaries gives an insight into the noir and brutal Los Angeles that Bukowski observed and lived so well. He was a legend in his time: a madman, a recluse, a lover...tender, vicious...never the same. These are exceptional stories that came pounding out of his violent and depraved life - horrible and holy. You cannot listen to them and come away the same again. Tales of Madness includes iconic stories "A .45 to Pay the Rent" about drug dealing, fatherhood and love on the other side of the law, and "The Great Zen Wedding" in which Bukowski goes off the rails as best man at a wealthy Hollywood affair. 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. ©1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1983 Charles Bukowski 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.
©1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1983 Charles Bukowski (P)2017 Audible, Inc.
Shadow's Fall
Summary
Shadow's Fall, book four...the conclusion. "I have tried to share everything. I have tried to hold nothing back. And so, I will tell you what happens next. You may judge me. You may cast your disapproval. You may call me fatalistic or dramatic. Weak. Or macabre. But you will never know. You will never understand. Because you have not lived my life. Find faults in my choices if you will, but this is what happened. Judge as you like, but know that my story does not require your permission. Do not forget that you are the one who decided to listen..." Violet Archer knows that something is coming. She just doesn't know what...or who. And, oh boy, is she ever in for it. She will need to battle the Darkness - all which surrounds her - as well as all which lies within. And while she knows her heart, it will be tested. Left behind by one man. Pursued by another. She believes she is the hero of her story. But Violet is about to learn that some heroes turn into villains. Note: Adult novel. Contains mature and explicit content.
©2020 Theresa Marie Hart (P)2020 Theresa Marie Hart