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Kurt Nordstrum, an engineer in Oslo, puts his life aside to take up arms against the Germans as part of the Norwegian resistance. After the loss of his fiancée, his outfit whittled to shreds, he commandeers a coastal steamer and escapes to England to transmit secret evidence of the Nazis' progress toward an atomic bomb at an isolated factory in Norway. There, he joins a team of dedicated Norwegians in training in the Scottish Highlands for a mission to disrupt the Nazis' plans before they advance any further.
An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.
Dr. Chris Shepard is 36 years old, newly married, and well on his way to a perfect life. Or so he believes. But that future is forever cast into doubt the day Special Agent Alexandra Morse walks into his office and drops a bombshell: Dr. Shepard's beautiful new wife is plotting his murder.
Responding to pressure from on high, the Atlanta Police Department is forced to hire its first black officers. It's a victory of sorts, though the newly minted policemen are met with deep hostility by their white peers, and their authority is limited: They can't arrest a suspect unless a white officer is present; they can't drive squad cars; they can't even enter the station through the front door.
For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch - hero, maverick, nighthawk - the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal. The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell.
It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.
Kurt Nordstrum, an engineer in Oslo, puts his life aside to take up arms against the Germans as part of the Norwegian resistance. After the loss of his fiancée, his outfit whittled to shreds, he commandeers a coastal steamer and escapes to England to transmit secret evidence of the Nazis' progress toward an atomic bomb at an isolated factory in Norway. There, he joins a team of dedicated Norwegians in training in the Scottish Highlands for a mission to disrupt the Nazis' plans before they advance any further.
An anonymous young woman murdered in a run-down hotel, all identifying characteristics dissolved by acid. A father publicly beheaded in the blistering heat of a Saudi Arabian public square. A notorious Syrian biotech expert found eyeless in a Damascus junkyard. Smoldering human remains on a remote mountainside in Afghanistan. A flawless plot to commit an appalling crime against humanity.
Dr. Chris Shepard is 36 years old, newly married, and well on his way to a perfect life. Or so he believes. But that future is forever cast into doubt the day Special Agent Alexandra Morse walks into his office and drops a bombshell: Dr. Shepard's beautiful new wife is plotting his murder.
Responding to pressure from on high, the Atlanta Police Department is forced to hire its first black officers. It's a victory of sorts, though the newly minted policemen are met with deep hostility by their white peers, and their authority is limited: They can't arrest a suspect unless a white officer is present; they can't drive squad cars; they can't even enter the station through the front door.
For LAPD homicide cop Harry Bosch - hero, maverick, nighthawk - the body in the drainpipe at Mulholland Dam is more than another anonymous statistic. This one is personal. The dead man, Billy Meadows, was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat" who fought side by side with him in a nightmare underground war that brought them to the depths of hell.
It is an obsession that has haunted Nick Malick for seven years - to avenge the murder of his young son. In his gut Malick knows who did it. But the psychopath is in prison for another crime, scheduled to be released in a year. All Malick has to do is wait...and survive.
Claudia Bishop's perfect life fell apart when the aftermath of a brutal assault left her with a crumbling marriage, a newborn daughter, and a constant sense of anxiety about the world around her. Now, looking for a fresh start with a home restoration project and growing blog, Claudia takes on a crumbling old house - one that, unbeknownst to her, has an ugly history and may hide long-buried secrets.
It is the fall of 1951 and the Korean War is raging. Twenty-six year-old Nicholai Hel has spent the last three years in solitary confinement at the hands of the Americans. Hel is a master of hoda korosu or "naked kill," fluent in seven languages, and has honed extraordinary "proximity sense" - an extra awareness of the presence of danger. He has the skills to be the world's most fearsome assassin and now the CIA needs him. The Americans offer Hel freedom, money, and a neutral passport in exchange for one small service: go to Beijing and kill the Soviet Union's Commissioner to China.
Se7en meets The Silence of the Lambs in this dark and twisting novel from the author Jeffery Deaver called "a talented writer with a delightfully devious mind". For over five years, the Four Monkey Killer has terrorized the residents of Chicago. When his body is found, the police quickly realize he was on his way to deliver one final message, one that proves he has taken another victim, who may still be alive.
Two hundred years ago a loyalist family fled to England to escape the American War of Independence and seemingly vanished into thin air. American genealogist Jefferson Tayte is hired to find out what happened, but it soon becomes apparent that a calculated killer is out to stop him.
As Nick peels back layer after layer of lies and deception, buffeted between the buried horrors of the past and the deadly intrigues of the present, he finds his own life - and the lives of nearly everyone he loves - at risk. And the only thing guiding him through this deadly labyrinth are his stepfather's dying words: TRUST NO ONE.
As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children, unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours.
Twenty years later, the found boy, Rob Ryan, is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a 12-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery.
A young woman is found, brutally murdered and left on gruesome display in the "safety" of her own home. The atrocity kicks off an investigation into a bizarre string of increasingly disturbing murders, all believed to be perpetrated by someone of unprecedented savagery and cunning.
When editor Susan Ryeland is given the manuscript of Alan Conway's latest novel, she has no reason to think it will be much different from any of his others. After working with the best-selling crime writer for years, she's intimately familiar with his detective, Atticus Pünd, who solves mysteries disturbing sleepy English villages. An homage to queens of classic British crime such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, Alan's traditional formula has proved hugely successful.
All Denny Malone wants is to be a good cop. He is the "King of Manhattan North", a highly decorated NYPD detective sergeant and the real leader of "Da Force". Malone and his crew are the smartest, the toughest, the quickest, the bravest, and the baddest - an elite special unit given carte blanche to fight gangs, drugs, and guns. Every day and every night for the 18 years he's spent on the job, Malone has served on the front lines, witnessing the hurt, the dead, the victims, the perps.
Alex Dale is lost. Destructive habits have cost her a marriage and a journalism career. All she has left is her routine: a morning run until her body aches, then a few hours of forgettable work before the past grabs hold and drags her down. Every day is treading water, every night is drowning. Until Alex discovers Amy Stevenson. Amy Stevenson, who was just another girl from a nearby town until the day she was found unconscious after a merciless assault.
Bronx-born top turret-gunner Arthur Meyerowitz was on his second mission when he was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the B-24 Liberator known as Harmful Lil Armful who escaped death or immediate capture on the ground. After fleeing the wreck, Arthur knocked on the door of an isolated farmhouse, whose owners hastily took him in. Fortunately, his hosts not only despised the Nazis but had a tight connection to the French resistance group Morhange and its founder, Marcel Taillandier.
After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: his sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.
It's 1944. Physics professor Alfred Mendel and his family are trying to flee Paris when they are caught and forced onto a train along with thousands of other Jewish families. At the other end of the long, torturous train ride, Alfred is separated from his family and sent to the men's camp, where all of his belongings are tossed on a roaring fire. His books, his papers, his life's work. The Nazis have no idea what they have just destroyed. And without that physical record, Alfred is one of only two people in the world with his particular knowledge. Knowledge that could start a war - or end it.
Nathan Blum works behind a desk at an intelligence office in Washington, DC, but he longs to contribute to the war effort in a more meaningful way, and he has a particular skill set the US suddenly needs. Nathan is fluent in German and Polish, and he proved his scrappiness at a young age when he escaped from the Krakow ghetto. Now the government wants him to take on the most dangerous assignment of his life: Nathan must sneak into Auschwitz on a mission to find and escape with one man.
This historical thriller from New York Times best seller Andrew Gross is a deeply affecting, pause-resisting series of twists and turns through a landscape at times horrifyingly familiar but still completely compelling.
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
I certainly would, although with one major proviso. Most of the activity in the book takes place at Auschwitz. Mr. Gross does not spare us any detail at all, and so squeamish readers really should not listen to this. And this is a shame, in a way, because the book is brilliant, and Mr. Ballerini's narration is once again thrilling. I will spare you the specifics of the plot, as it twists and turns in challenging ways. Constant readers may remember that I have said that I had had enough of WWII. It was seventy years ago, and we have had countless works of literature, movies and art of all kinds to remind us of the horrors. You cannot avoid them here. What actually happened in the camps is shown under a blazing, bright light. Just a plot overview: Nathan Bloom, a refugee from Warsaw who now works in the US, is called by FDR himself to sneak INTO Auschwitz, to find one of the two masters of the world in a science which I can't begin to understand. However, Robert Oppenheimer, Fermi and the others at Los Alamos have told the president that this one man, Alfred Mendel, could reduce the research time required to develop the bomb by six months. FDR agrees, and he and his staff ask Nathan if he will get in, find Professor Mendel, get him out, and fly back to England and then to New Mexico. It is one hell of a story, which truly has you gripping the arms of your chair until the very end.
Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?
Yes. As above, the mission is quite complicated, and a large number of characters contribute to the action. There is so much going on that it is almost impossible to keep track of the many threads. There is a small subplot involving a married woman named Greta, wife of the monster second-in-command of the camp, and a young boy named Leo. Leo is a chess champion, and he is also the possessor of a very extensive photographic memory. This ability of his turns out to be supremely important at the end of the book.
Have you listened to any of Edoardo Ballerini’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I have probably listened to fifty or sixty of his performances. He has been my favorite reader for years now, and this book is fully deserving of his extraordinary talents. Except for a few books which are about the history of Italy, I have enjoyed almost all of the books he has read. This is not his greatest, but it's up there. If you would like to listen to something completely different, with no violence whatever, try Beautiful Ruins. And from there, just search for his performances, and you will no doubt come to appreciate him as I do. Some very popular narrators would kill to have anything like the skills that this man has.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Yes. I will not spoil the moments. There is one that is very near the end. There is another involving Leo and Greta, and one that comes close to the end, in which Greta and her repulsive husband have it out, so to speak.
Any additional comments?
It must be quite clear how much I enjoyed this book. I am truly sorry to reach the end of it. I still feel like I have had enough of WWII, but apparently there are a number of authors who are creating fresh material, and doing it in exciting ways. And speaking of wars, a book that has lifted me right out of my chair recently is Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain. I have reviewed it elsewhere. It is about the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, and, IMHO, it is the modern-day Catch 22. A true masterpiece. If you haven't read it, you are in for an amazing treat.
75 of 79 people found this review helpful
I have never had a book so good that I had to stop reading it to calm my nerves! I became so caught up in this book that I felt I was there experiencing it with these wonderful characters created by Mr. Gross. It kept me on the edge of my seat through the horrors of what man has done to man in war.
Our heroes are often simple men of humble beginnings who put the lives of others before their own for God, country and family. Bloom is one such man who must break Into hell to retrieve the one man who may save the world from killing itself. Bravo Mr. Gross for a really great read.
39 of 41 people found this review helpful
Would you listen to The One Man again? Why?
Yes, I would, but only after the story has settled in my mind. I might be a while. The story is really well written and I loved the characters.
Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?
No - but it kept my attention. The book involves you and you are just seeing the raw humanity in the book but also that good is found in the worst places.
Which character – as performed by Edoardo Ballerini – was your favorite?
Mr. Bloom
Any additional comments?
It would have been awesome if people could have really liberated people out the concentration camps. Helas, a dark period of our human history, but this book will stay with you for a bit. Bowing my head in memory of all the lost, wonderful, smart souls that passed away in the concentration camps. May we NEVER forget!
7 of 7 people found this review helpful
Best book I've listened to all year!
Could not shut it off. Even while taking a shower! Totally brings you in, you feel like you are there with the characters as things are happening. It's definitely a must own!
12 of 13 people found this review helpful
This is historical fiction and a thriller. Highly recommended! The narration was as good as it gets! Don't miss out on this one!
25 of 28 people found this review helpful
I listen to two books per week. Most recently I've been quite disappointed by many of the books newly released. This book is up there with Nightingale, and Once we were brothers. Excellent characters, highly engaging, and understandable even to those with little knowledge or interest in chemistry/ physics.
The characters were most memorable. Loved it start to finish!!!
18 of 20 people found this review helpful
A tremendously uplifting book about the human spirit. Strong characters. Lots of action. Compelling and fabulous narration.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful
after listening to this book I'm determined to listen to as many Edoardo Ballerini books as possible. he was fantastic with all the different accents and characters. the story was fantastic as well. it kept me engaged throughout the whole book which doesn't happen often!!
12 of 14 people found this review helpful
If you love WW2 historical fiction this is a must read. Best book I have listened to in a long time. I could not stop listening. Superior writing, superior narration, perfection!
3 of 3 people found this review helpful
This book was great and sad when considering the setting. It keep me interested the whole way and the story line was compelling. Highly recommend it.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful