David Levien has written a thriller with an interesting plot, interesting characters, a good sense of acceleration, etc. However, Scott Brick is so an..Show More »noying that he almost ruins the book. I don't understand his popularity. He only has one gear, and that is 100 mph. It is odd that he has narrated one of my all-time favorite audiobooks: The Ice Limit. His sense of pace fit that great book in a way that made his one-dimensional approach work.. However, for the 450 other books he has narrated, his limits are clear. Compared to Edoardo Balerini, for instance, he is outclassed in so many ways that Balerini should have narrated 450 books, not the other way around. In this book a 12-year-old boy is kidnapped by some sleazeballs, and he disappears for fourteen months before his grief-stricken parents give up on the police and hire a private investigator, the one-named Baer. In the classic form of the rogue ex-cop who could not fit in politically (this plot is becoming too common in thrillers these days) Baer can do things that the actual cops cannot. I won't spoil the denouement (Fancy French word, huh? It means the end and resolution of questions) for you, but rest assured it takes Levien a long time to get there, and by that time I got so annoyed by Mr. Brick that it was hard for me to continue. The parents of the kidnapped boy are appropriately grief-stricken and their marriage has gone stone cold. They just want to know what happened to their boy. In an interesting twist, Baer breaks his own rules and lets the father, Paul, help him work on the case. We get a good look at the unhealthy life of a strip club, but this is nothing new. I can't really recommend this book, as there are so many others in the genre that are better. Almost all forty of the Robert B. Parker Spenser series are better than this book, and each of them is only about five hours long. Elmore Leonard could write circles around Mr. Levien. Go for the Big Boys. Why spend your time with amateurs?

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