K Cornwinkle

The structure is ideal. The craftsmanship is wonderful -the novel was constructed and finished like some complex engineering creation, say a high rise or, perhaps a tennis court, cantilevered over the sea. This is not a slight -great art often depends on great craftsmanship. The language shines though for me, Edoardo Ballerini's reading may have taken it farther than reading it myself.
I rarely laugh out loud listening to novels, particularly since I might be listening with my wife or the three year old asleep next to me. BUT, this made me laugh out loud twice. Once at dialogue and once at a plot twist. Naturally, Beautiful Ruins makes me want to visit Liguria AND perhaps rent Cleopatra.

Good story and lots of tension. If you are someone more accustomed to conventional thrillers, you'll need to reconcile yourself to knowing in more detail what people are wearing.
I don't think I ever read a Nora Roberts novel before and skimming some of the other titles at the bookstore I'm thinking (as some have said) that this is a bit different. Glad I enjoyed it.

Dies the Fire was interesting and the clichés were newish then but by the time I've heard them this many times and there've been this many coincidences, this much incredible luck, and so many implausibilies beyond the fundamental Alien Space Bat implausibility of the disappearance of explosives/guns, internal combustion and electricity, I'm just plum tired of it. BTW, I'm surprised there isn't more use of hydraulic technology.
I like Todd McLaren's voice and his acting is good but some accents are off -don't try if you can't do them- and every ~20 pages or so there is a jarring mispronunciation. The persistent corzman/corzmen for corpsman for example is particularly grating. Okay, Obama said it this way once but multiple times in multiple books?
I think if I had known how marginal this was, I would not have gone beyond Dies the Fire but now I'm committed and my Virgo nature prohibits simply Googling the plot to find out what happens.

The writing is much better; less cliches (although dawn comes up like thunder -how does this metaphor even work, I've always wondered).
Bonus points for strong female characters without all of them being over the top.
Alas, like 1632, the book is so long (not that I mind) that one tends to start wondering about the plausibility of the rapid adaptations of what remains of 20th century technology to the times -steam engines and the like. Not as quickly in this series but still.
Also, the bad guy, while evil to the core is not a cartoon and needs to be the sociopath he is for what he does to work.
Unlike 1632, one can't Wiki the history (what on earth was the 30 years war -ah, there it is-MY GOD!) along with the plot. Many of the civilizations exist only in speculative and sometimes somewhat arcane archaeology.I kind of wonder if this is a cult book on Nantucket and at the USCG Academy.

starting with Sebastian's gray late teens in Alaska (hating living in his mom's basement -smells like mold to me) moving through Marines boot camp and on to duty in DC and the Gulf. If it isn't based closely on his life, he's able to completely nail someone's (italics) life.
Particularly with this narrator, it's a bit like sitting next to someone very bright and articulate -a good storyteller- on a cross country Greyhound ride and hearing their story though the night, shaking hands at the end, saying good bye and then, as you wander back off to your life thinking to yourself, "Man, that guy went through some crazy s*** ."
I listened to this mainly over Christmas in Maine, running in the 10° snow. It fit.

This wasn't actually noir - though the small-city Illinois setting tends give the whole thing a greyish tinge.
I loved the premise of an older couple deciding that killing for hire (only really bad guys) was okay and I liked the details of the central family who have any number of believable struggles. It was easy to sympathize with them, Detective Morgan Halliday and the rest of the goodish guys. Bernadette Dunne was a perfect storyteller for this.

like a breathless tabloid TV show. At one relatively unimportant point he says, "A MILLION dollars" and all I could think of was Dr. Evil in Austin Powers. I could not finish the book. Maybe I'll read it in print but my impressions is that Krakauer too amps everything up unecessarily - the story and the history of the Church and these offshoots is interesting (and bizarre and ugly) without selective information, hyperbole or reader-dragging.

of writing a novel .The story is clever though I think it gets a little lost in the ~second half. I don't know if it portrays the publishing world accurately; if so, not such a great place to work. Chicago is shown as a generally unpleasant place and John Lincoln has only occasional episodes of happiness there. I did NOT laugh out loud at anything.
Jeff Cummings was probably an appropriate choice for narrator channeling the whininess and near-swooning of John Lincoln but I can't say it was all that pleasant a listen.

which is what I did and though I could not listen to it all the way without breaks for fiction or music I finished it. Interestingly, I got an email from a very conservative family member with a bunch of paranoid non-facts about this very highway and felt much too smug pointing out the reality of the politics behind the NAFTA elements. Mr Dellinger's descriptions of the people and communities are treats.

Ray Porter is fantastic and kept me with this even when the dialogue felt like it was sagging a bit (not so often). There are some images that will stay with you a long time after you read it; some good, some interesting and some very scary.

fresh. It is one of the more hopeful and realistic post-apocalypse novels. I particularly like that it does not make anachronistic predictions about the future -either before or after the event.