The Fallen

By: Mark Terry

Narrated by: Johnny Heller

Length: 8 hrs and 42 mins

Publisher's summary

Twenty world leaders meet for the G8 Summit at the beautiful Cheyenne Resort in Colorado Springs. But an ugly plot lurks beneath the surface: a terrorist group, The Fallen Angels, plans to wreak havoc on the Summit. With the Secret Service, the FBI, Homeland Security, the military, and security from twenty different governments on-hand, shouldn't the resort be the safest place in the world? It seems impossible that a terrorist group could infiltrate the Summit. And yet they do. Within minutes, twenty world leaders are taken hostage, and Richard Coffee, the group's leader, makes his first demand: release twenty detainees from Guantanamo Bay, or he'll execute one leader each hour until his demands are met.

Only one man can disrupt this plot. Derek Stillwater is that man. Working undercover as a maintenance man at the resort, Stillwater will wage war on the world's deadliest, most sophisticated terrorist organization, picking off the terrorists one by one-until he comes face-to-face with an evil force from his past, Richard Coffee, The Fallen Angel himself.

©2010 Mark Terry (P)2012 Mark Terry

Excellent action, adventure fiction

What made the experience of listening to The Fallen the most enjoyable?

The story line was action packed from the minute it began. The characters were well developed and the story unfolded nicely. The person who performed, at first, sounded a little unusual to me, but Johnny Heller was able to create different inflections and accents to be able to differentiate between different characters that were believable. I use audiobooks when commuting and found this quite entertaining, and at times did not want to leave the car to go in to work.

Great ol' fashioned good guys vs. bad guys yarn

Imagine a Tom Clancy novel without all the political wrangling, the long-winded opining about abortion or unrelated topics or other unnecessary filler. Just the juicy action scenes, neatly stitched together into a coherent treat.

There's nothing deep here, and that's clearly not Terry's intent. This is just for fun, and a lot of fun it is. Bombings, shootings, crawls through air ducts, falls, more shootings, more air ducts, and plenty of grisly descriptions of bad guys dying.

The audio version is unfortunately narrated by a mediocre reader. Heller is competent, but in no way outstanding. His character voices are particularly weak compared to top narrators like Simon Vance. I occasionally had trouble figuring out who was speaking in some scenes.