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The Dispatcher
- Narrated by: Zachary Quinto
- Length: 2 hrs and 18 mins
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Publisher's summary
Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)
Winner, 2017 APA Audie Awards - Original Work
From master storyteller and Hugo Award-winner John Scalzi comes this Audible Original novella, winner of the 2017 Audie Award for Best Original Work. Emmy-nominated actor Zachary Quinto—best known for his roles as the Nimoy-approved Spock in the Star Trek reboot and the menacing, power-stealing serial killer Sylar in Heroes—brings his well-earned sci-fi credentials and simmering intensity to this genre-bending thriller.
One day, not long from now, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone—999 times out of a thousand, anyone who is intentionally killed comes back. How? We don't know. But it changes everything: war, crime, daily life.
Enter Tony Valdez, professional Dispatcher. True to their name, these licensed assassins are tasked with humanely disposing of people in death’s crosshairs to offer them a second chance at avoiding the reaper. When a friend and fellow Dispatcher goes missing, Valdez is plunged into a web of intrigue both professional and personal.
It's a race against time for Valdez to find his friend before it's too late...before not even a Dispatcher can save him.
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Go Behind the Scenes with Zachary Quinto
Publisher's summary
Earphones Award Winner (AudioFile Magazine)
Winner, 2017 APA Audie Awards - Original Work
From master storyteller and Hugo Award-winner John Scalzi comes this Audible Original novella, winner of the 2017 Audie Award for Best Original Work. Emmy-nominated actor Zachary Quinto—best known for his roles as the Nimoy-approved Spock in the Star Trek reboot and the menacing, power-stealing serial killer Sylar in Heroes—brings his well-earned sci-fi credentials and simmering intensity to this genre-bending thriller.
One day, not long from now, it becomes almost impossible to murder anyone—999 times out of a thousand, anyone who is intentionally killed comes back. How? We don't know. But it changes everything: war, crime, daily life.
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The Cove is a quaint little postcard town made up only of old folk who sell the World's Greatest Ice Cream - a secret recipe that brings lots of tourists into town.
Into The Cove comes Sally Brainerd, daughter of murdered Amory St. John, of Washington, D.C., seeking sanctuary, and FBI Special Agent James Quinlan, who's undercover and after her. He's got a murder to solve, and he believes she's the key. But is she really?
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Not for anyone sensitive about sexual violence
- By bookish327 on 08-19-12
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Big City, Bad Blood
- By: Sean Chercover
- Narrated by: Joe Barrett
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Disillusioned newspaper reporter-turned-private detective Ray Dudgeon doesn't want to save the world; he just wants to do an honest job well. But when doing an honest job threatens society's most powerful and corrupt, Ray's odds of survival make for a sucker's bet.
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Quintessentially Chicago
- By Eva Gannon on 09-21-09
By: Sean Chercover
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Fundraising the Dead
- A Museum Mystery
- By: Sheila Connolly
- Narrated by: Robin Miles
- Length: 10 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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At The Society for the Preservation of Pennsylvania Antiques, fundraiser Eleanor "Nell" Pratt solicits donations - and sometimes solves crimes. When a collection of George Washington's letters is lost on the same day that an archivist is found dead, it seems strange that the Society president isn't pushing for an investigation. Nell goes digging herself, and soon uncovers a long, rich history of crime.
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Not Sure About This Series
- By Chalis on 11-21-14
By: Sheila Connolly
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On Borrowed Time
- By: David Rosenfelt
- Narrated by: Chris Ensweiler
- Length: 7 hrs
- Unabridged
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Richard Kilmer is head over heels in love with Jennifer Ryan, who takes him home to meet her parents, where she accepts his marriage proposal. While visiting, they set out on a nostalgic drive up to Kendrick Falls. On their way, a freak storm rolls in, Richard loses control of his car, and it rolls. When the storm clears in a matter of seconds, Jen is gone. Richard can't find her, and neither can the police who respond to the scene.
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Not enough dogs!
- By Rowan Mangan on 09-18-11
By: David Rosenfelt
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Silence: The Faces of Evil Christmas Prequel
- By: Debra Webb
- Narrated by: Alicia Bordon
- Length: 2 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Ten years ago... Special Agent Jess Harris has closed another tough case, and now she's determined to make it home to spend Christmas with her only family, her sister. Jess needs a break, and taking it far away from work is the only way to keep her mind off the many faces of evil waiting in the stack of case files on her desk. Running into the past wasn't part of the plan... Daniel Burnett was Jess' first love. She'd fallen hard for him in high school. Together they'd gone off to college with big dreams.
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Christmas Mystery
- By bec/audiothing on 11-30-15
By: Debra Webb
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Fault Line
- Ben Treven, Book 1
- By: Barry Eisler
- Narrated by: Barry Eisler
- Length: 9 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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In Silicon Valley, the eccentric inventor of a new encryption application is murdered in an apparent drug deal. In Istanbul, a cynical undercover operator receives a frantic call from his estranged brother, a patent lawyer who believes he is the next victim. And on the sun-drenched slopes of Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley's nerve center of money and technology, old family hurts sting anew as two brothers who share nothing but blood and bitterness wage a desperate battle against a faceless enemy.
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Boy was I wrong
- By Jerry on 02-22-14
By: Barry Eisler
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City of Windows
- A Novel
- By: Robert Pobi
- Narrated by: Stephen Graybill
- Length: 11 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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During the worst blizzard in memory, an FBI agent in a moving SUV in New York City is killed by a nearly impossible sniper shot. Unable to pinpoint where the shot came from, as the storm rapidly wipes out evidence, the agent-in-charge Brett Kehoe turns to the one man who might be able to help them - former FBI agent Lucas Page. Page, a university professor and best-selling author, left the FBI years ago after a tragic event robbed him of the willingness to continue. Lucas Page has no interest in helping the FBI - except for the fact that the victim was his former partner.
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Great Story until the Lecture Began.....
- By Thomas on 08-08-19
By: Robert Pobi
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Clean
- A Mindspace Investigations Novel, Book 1
- By: Alex Hughes
- Narrated by: Daniel May
- Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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I used to work for the Telepath’s Guild before they kicked me out for a drug habit that wasn’t entirely my fault. Now I work for the cops, helping Homicide Detective Isabella Cherabino put killers behind bars. My ability to get inside the twisted minds of suspects makes me the best interrogator in the department. But the normals keep me on a short leash. When the Tech Wars ripped the world apart, the Guild stepped up to save it. But they had to get scary to do it - real scary.
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Some good, Some annoying!
- By Lisa on 01-03-14
By: Alex Hughes
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Deal Breaker
- The First Myron Bolitar Novel
- By: Harlan Coben
- Narrated by: Jonathan Marosz
- Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins
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Sports agent Myron Bolitar is poised on the edge of the big-time. So is Christian Steele, a rookie quarterback and Myron's prized client. But when Christian gets a phone call from a former girlfriend, a woman who everyone, including the police, believes is dead, the deal starts to go sour. Suddenly Myron is plunged into a baffling mystery of sex and blackmail.
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Deal Breaker
- By Lisa on 07-02-08
By: Harlan Coben
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Cash Landing
- A Novel
- By: James Grippando
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
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Every week a hundred million dollars in cash arrives at Miami International Airport, shipped by German banks to the Federal Reserve. A select group of trusted workers moves the bags through customs and loads them into armored trucks.
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Good Start To The Series
- By Lia on 10-21-18
By: James Grippando
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The Rabbit Factory
- By: Marshall Karp
- Narrated by: Tom Stechschulte, James Jenner
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Marshall Karp is an acclaimed playwright known for his witty sense of humor and crackling dialogue. His debut novel The Rabbit Factory stars the irreverent LAPD detective duo of Mike Lomax and Terry Biggs. Dean Lamaar is the architect of an entertainment empire and the creator of iconic characters like Rambunctious Rabbit and McGreedy the Moose.
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Bizarre but engaging mystery.1st-rate performance.
- By MidwestGeek on 12-19-12
By: Marshall Karp
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When COVID-19 sweeps through New York City, Jamie Gray is stuck as a dead-end driver for food-delivery apps. That is, until Jamie makes a delivery to an old acquaintance, Tom, who works at what he calls “an animal rights organization”. Tom’s team needs a last-minute grunt to handle things on their next field visit. Jamie, eager to do anything, immediately signs on. What Tom doesn't tell Jamie is that the animals his team cares for are not here on Earth. Not our Earth, at at least. In an alternate dimension, dinosaur-like creatures named Kaiju roam a warm and human-free world.
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I'm listening with a permanent smile on my face
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The B-Team
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Colonial Union Ambassador Ode Abumwe and her team are used to life on the lower end of the diplomatic ladder. But when a high-profile diplomat goes missing, Abumwe and her team are last minute replacements on a mission critical to the Colonial Union’s future. As the team works to pull off their task, CDF Lieutenant Harry Wilson discovers there’s more to the story of the missing diplomats than anyone expected... a secret that could spell war for humanity.
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Obumwe said, Eagan said, Wilson said, Rickney said
- By A Fitts on 01-18-13
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Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place. Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan. Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie. But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits.
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Volcanic Lairs, Death Rays & Cats… Oh My! 😼
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I love Scalzi's writing but not this book
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At a shadowy company (Karoli Robotics Corporation) owned by a Sillicon Valley billionaire, a scientist named Jim creates an AI that can fool the Turing test at the same time as his colleague, Daniel, successfully synthesizes DNA in a test tube. Daniel's attempts to reanimate dead chimps using his discovery have been unsuccessful, but when his friend Laura Bocelli is killed by being trapped inside a lab freezer, Daniel is presented with the perfect specimen. However, Laura is irreparably brain dead.
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Can't recommend
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The President's Brain Is Missing
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The question is, how can you tell the President's brain is missing? And are we sure we need it back?
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A World War I soldier writes a love note to his pregnant wife, puts it in a bottle and drops it in the English Channel. Decades later a fisherman finds it and delivers the message to the daughter the soldier never got to meet. Although this heart-warming tale is fiction, it is based on real-life events.
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So sweet and thoughtful
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Equipped with the entirety of human knowledge, a sentient ship is launched on a last-ditch journey to find a new home for civilization. Trillions of miles. Tens of thousands of years. In the space between, the AI has plenty of time to think about life, the vastness of the universe, everything it was meant to do, and—with a perspective created but not limited by humans—what it should do.
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Lovely story! Lovely performance
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Self Help
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Jack Diller is just one more struggling actor on the road to nowhere. He’s got an agent who barely remembers his name, his ex-girlfriend has hooked up with a Silicon Valley dude, and the milk in his fridge is so far past its sell-by date it’s historic. The only way Jack can scrape together a bare existence is by delivering food to exactly the types of successful people he wishes he could be. Then, one day, a very strange audiobook shows up on his phone.
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Entertaining and slightly thought provoking, overall humorous
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METAtropolis
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Armed camps of eco-survivalists battle purveyors of technology in this exclusive, original production featuring five sci-fi masters and five all-star narrators.
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Not a wasted credit
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What listeners say about The Dispatcher
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Jim "The Impatient"
- 10-05-16
IT'S HARD TO GET MYSTICAL ABOUT YOUR JOB
IT'S JUST TAX MONEY
1. Those who love Scalzi's sense of humor, need to know that this has none of that.
2. This is dark and serious
3.This has none of the he said, she said, that seems to upset some people.
4. There is not an iota of science in this.
5. This is more of a paranormal, and seems to be a set up for a series similar to Harry Dresden.
5. Nothing is ever explained as far as the phenomenon that leads to dispatchers. Dispatchers kill people just before they die of other causes. This makes them come back alive 999 times out of 1000.
6. It is entertaining and worth your time.
7. narrator is top notch
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- Matthew
- 11-09-16
Good Grief This Was Good
Any additional comments?
A phenomenal book, such that I don't believe John Scalzi is the author. I quite like Scalzi's works, but I think of them as highly entertaining mediocrity. First with Lock In and now this, I think he has grown to a new level.
Scalzi's standard humor that he is known for is absent in this book, but do not let that scare you off. It may be short, but there is a solid and strong story here that kept me riveted to the end. Then after I had finished it, I kept thinking about it long after the last words were spoken.
And spoken they were! Zachary Quinto is phenomenal!
Truly this is an easy recommendation to anyone who wants a thriller or a mystery with a clever spin.
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- John
- 07-19-17
Sounds Like Television.
I am not a snob about clothes (you’d agree if you could see me). I’m not a snob about food. Or wine. Or bourbon. Or cars. But I am…um…particular about the books I read and listen to. The current popular fiction I glimpse on tablets or in paperback editions on the train seems, mostly, like nothing that would do much to elevate my mind or illuminate my inner being.
Does that sound horrible? I don’t mean for it to. It’s just that I’ve got more life behind me than ahead of me, and I want every book to count. Not trying to be dramatic. It’s just the truth.
So, when Audible offered The Dispatcher for free last October, I only snapped it up because I thought I might be wrong. I might be dismissing great stories just because they weren’t time-tested classics. I might be a victim of my own, perhaps too-precious discernment.
Turns out I was wrong. True, the Dispatcher sounds just like those books I sometimes read over peoples’ shoulders on the way to and from work: like television. Not in any way demanding. No need to rewind and savor a sentence or pause to mull over a fresh insight into the human dilemma. But I enjoyed it thoroughly.
This is a great little piece of science fiction. An odd thing is happening to people who get murdered: they come back. Scalzi’s accomplishment here is to make that completely believable, and then to play out some of the possibilities that scenario offers. Granted, there was far more profanity than I’m used to. Some of the social attitudes annoyed me. And I’m not sure I could have stood an entire novel in the same style. But I enjoyed this short, crisp, well-wrought story very much.
I admit to being out of the loop about what our narrator, Zachary Quinto, has done on stage and screen. But his performance, while excellent overall, got a little shaky in the distinguishing-the-voices department, probably the toughest part of audiobook narration.
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- ibillinsly@gmail
- 02-19-18
3.69 stars...not bad for a short story
I got this as a Daily Deal for $1, so it was definitely worth that. It was a nice short story, but nothing that would cause me to immediately download more John Scalzi books. The story is a bit above average, and the same goes for the narrator.There's nothing exceptional or terrible here. It's an easy, short listen, and it is somewhat entertaining. If you're not looking to get into anything long or complicated and just want a good performance of a decent story that will hold your attention, then The Dispatcher is for you.
Overall rating: 3.69 stars
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- Joe Kraus
- 02-17-18
Clever Premise Mostly Unexplored
Several years ago, on the strength of something I started and gave up on almost immediately, I pegged Scalzi as a genre hack. I can’t remember what I read, but I know it reminded me of what I think of as the worst in fantasy: something that took itself too seriously, felt bloated, and depended on trite elements of the form.
Lately, though, I’ve been hearing things that made me think I might have miscast him. Someone somewhere praised his more recent non-fantasy series, and then this book came up on sale and mercifully short. So, I gave it a shot.
In praise of this, I did finish it. What’s more, I admire the root premise: it’s a world where something has changed so that anyone murdered by another returns to life. I grant the intriguing possibilities of that potentially supernatural phenomenon. I further grant that it’s an interesting move to imagine specialists in killing in such a changed world. These dispatchers kill people – usually in hospitals – so they will avoid natural deaths and thereby return to life.
But that’s about where my admiration stops. There’s a mystery in place, but there’s little grace in its exposition or its solution. It’s set in Chicago so, of course, it involves the mob. It also involves hot dogs and the best toppings for them, however briefly. And there’s a cop with whom our protagonist reluctantly partners. None of that material is especially compelling or memorable.
Worse, Scalzi barely mines the implications of his premise. He has his character embrace a too-easy agnosticism. When someone asks if the phenomenon of such resurrections is proof of the divine, he suggests a better proof would be for people to stop wanting to kill each other. That’s a good line, but it suggests a disappointing lack of interest in something so profound.
Since anyone who murders someone provokes this response, it isn’t clear why we need specialists like Valdez. Wouldn’t it make sense for doctors just to kill patients whose operations they’ve botched? Why bring in an outsider when anyone could do it?
In an even more glaring oversight, there’s no real consideration about the change in the value of a life if it’s suddenly so much harder to get killed. Beyond the theological implications, there ought to be existential ones: what does it mean to be alive if, suddenly, we get more chances at life than just the one? I’m not asking for Sartre, but I am asking for something along the lines of the excellent insights of Claire North’s The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August.
Anyway, I’m willing to bump Scalzi up one notch from the pay-no-mind-at-all level I first assigned him to, but I’m not persuaded to try any more of his work.
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- mthasleem
- 04-27-17
Great premise to an engrossing story
Quick book to finish; great narration and entertaining story with an intriguing premise. Highly recommended.
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- Placeholder
- 10-04-16
I want more!
Love the concept.
Scalzi made another masterpiece of a world.
And Zachary Quinto is amazing. Who knew he would be so awesome at narration.
As I said, I want more.
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- Zero
- 10-21-16
Has a few flaws but still good
It's an interesting short story with an unusual premise and I would definitely recommend it, but it does have a few flaws. First, as much as a I like John Scalzi, not EVERY main character has to be a wise cracking super sarcastic hero whenever he's under the gun, and for this guy in particular it felt out of character. Second, I don't buy that someone who has spent years doing shady, probably illegal deals on the side decides to start hinting about it and late spilling his guts to a police officer he just met. Last, Zachary Quinto is a great actor and he does an awesome just with the voices, BUT there is nothing more irritating than a voice actor breathing into the microphone, which he does when he's doing the old woman voice.
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- Walker B.
- 04-10-19
ehh
It starts like it's going to have a deep and interesting ending. then it ends without answering anything. very disappointing and the first original I haven't liked
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- Daniel Carter
- 04-28-17
Great short story
This was a great story. I was left wanting more and would definitely go for a sequel if there was one.
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