Gunbarrel Highway

De: Sean Bridges

Narrado por: Patricia Zamora

Texas trophy wife Claudia Grant dies after she causes an early morning car accident. In the other vehicle, Daniel Morrison, an attorney struggling with a pending divorce and pill addiction, panics and leaves the scene.

The victim’s husband, congressional candidate Hayden Grant, is a corrupt politician who seizes the opportunity and places a million-dollar reward on Morrison’s capture. Dead or alive.

Daniel is on the run. Roya Navarro, a determined San Antonio police detective, is hot on his trail with local law enforcement, county sheriffs, a hungry journalist, and trigger-happy citizens all across the Lone Star state out on the hunt for the bounty.

©2024 The Wild Rose Press (P)2024 Sean Patrick Bridges

The twists and turns are stellar

AUDIOBOOK & EBOOK REVIEW. In GUNBARREL HIGHWAY by Sean Bridges, the tale that unfolds is a non-stop, action-packed, outrageous (yet totally believable) story that thoroughly entertains the reader.

I listened to the audiobook initially, and I don’t recommend it. More on that later. But in listening, I was able to sift through the noise enough to know this is a book that packs a punch. So, upon finishing the audiobook, I opened up the eBook and it was like a whole different story.

The attention-grabbing, blush-worthy opening paragraph told from Claudia Grant’s perspective is steamy, but not overly graphic. And for those who don’t much love the spice, fear not! That scene continues some thirty pages later, and then, the rest of GUNBARREL HIGHWAY is pure adrenaline-inducing fiction. Author Bridges does a great job in the first few chapters of building up the mindsets and character of Claudia, and the main character Daniel, before the big wreck that changes everything.

“Bro. Bro. Legal or not, who gives a XXXX? You. You’re guilty as XXXX. You know how I know that? I saw it on TV.”

This quote from hillbilly-ish, brother-in-law Ron, may be the most poignant from the book. It highlights what strikes hardest in GUNBARREL HIGHWAY: what should be sensationalism is, sadly, easily imagined in our current political and societal climate. From the not-so-subtle racism and immoral and illegal activities of a congressional candidate to the if-it’s-on-tv-it’s-true mentality and people turning savage on each other for an improbable reward, this book mirrors our messed-up world. The plots and subplots in GUNBARREL HIGHWAY are a scary and disheartening train wreck that keeps readers turning pages.

Author Bridges knows how to flesh out his characters, presenting readers with a robust cast who fall mostly on the unlikable end of the scale. (Detective Navarro being the exception, though I couldn’t understand why San Antonio Police would be assigned a case that happened in San Marcos.) Add to that the omniscient point of view that puts us inside many individuals' heads, we know them inside and out. Bridges’s writing is engaging, and he employs some interesting style choices and word combinations; the former went unnoticed in the audiobook, but both interrupted the flow of the story when reading with my eyes. A bit of additional editing to clean-up the smattering of errors and overused words and to tighten up unnecessary and unnecessarily long passages, would take this book to the highest level.

Anyone who follows my reviews knows it’s a rare book that passes editing muster for me, and I understand that many readers will blow past the things I notice. It’s a bit of a curse to have eyes drawn to errors, and that’s why it’s often a pleasure to read with my ears and enjoy an audiobook where I can’t see them. Unfortunately, the audiobook is a hot mess.

From a technical standpoint, there are two different chapters that repeat entire scenes from other chapters, and several other places where lines are repeated. Additionally, listeners hear the narrator taking deep breaths and even swallowing. The narrator’s natural voice during expository sections is engaging, and if she’d just read the book instead of performing, it probably would have been great. But most of the characters are over-the-top, exaggerated, and unevenly voiced, and the accents chosen for some of the characters are puzzling. The pacing is inconsistent, and there are several words mispronounced. I do not recommend listening to GUNBARREL HIGHWAY because the delivery doesn’t do Bridges’s story justice.

So back to the eBook: despite the polishing issues, the twists and turns in GUNBARREL HIGHWAY are stellar. Even when the reader is likely to predict an outcome, how that outcome comes to fruition is often a huge shocker. Things get REALLY interesting with a big reveal that changes the course of the story. It is truly nothing but edge-of-your-seat reading from that point right to the end, when at last, characters and readers alike can take a collective deep breath.