Town at the Edge of Darkness

The Excoms, Book 2

By: Brett Battles

Narrated by: Allyson Johnson

Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

From USA Today best-selling author Brett Battles comes the second book in a spin-off series from his award-winning Jonathan Quinn thrillers.

Something's happening in the small town of Bradbury. Something more sinister than the disappearance of the woman the Excoms have been sent to find. Something only they can stop.

Ananke, Rosario, Dylan, Liesel, and Ricky have reassembled to undertake their second mission. Seems easy enough: locate the missing woman and be on their way. But not even the mysterious Administrator who called them together could have predicted what the team would encounter.

Inhumanity comes in many forms. The Excoms despise them all.

©2017 Brett Battles (P)2018 Audible, Inc.

Thrilling

Cant wait for the next Ex-coms. Brett Battles never fails. Twists, turns, excitement and jaw dropping moments.

A fun listen

The early attempts at humor fall a bit short, but the second act more than atones for those shortcomings

Great Series. Narration needs work.

This is a great series. I am really enjoying the concept of this elite group.

There is murder, mystery, kidnapping, human trafficking, bad guys, good guys and a lot of action.

I like all the characters, Ananke, Rosario, Dylan, Liesel, and Ricky. They never knew each other until the Administrator put them together, now they are an elite team and work well together.

I totally recommend this series. The first book is The Excoms.

As for the narration, it cold be better. Allyson Johnson needs to work on her male voices. otherwise its good. Not the worst narration but not the best either.

Can't go wrong with a Brett Battles book!

Ananke and her team are sent to a small town in Washington state to find a missing woman. She had been gathering info for the CEO of an up and coming company. Something underhanded was going on there and she was getting him proof. Then she disappeared. Supposedly she sent a text message suing she was going out of town.
When the team begins their investigation they find that the data on her phone had been manipulated. The inaccuracies begin when doctored data shows that her phone was off when it had actually been on. When Ananke, Rosario & Ricky (operatives) break into the woman's house they find her desktop computer missing but not her luggage. Then a local police officer comes snooping around the house checking booby traps to see if they've been sprung. Is she in on it? Or is she worried about her friend? Does she know what's going on in town?
Then Ricky see something going on in the middle of the night. Security vehicles and vans unload unconscious people in wheelchairs. Are they being trafficked or is it something more sinister? Is the missing woman just the top of an iceberg?
As with the Jonathan Quinn series this book moves along at s good clip. There is planning and replanning. Theories replaced by new with each new discovery until the entire conspiracy is uncovered. Book 2 is equally as good if not better then the first.
Allyson Johnson does an excellent job narrating. She even does men well!
My HIGHLY RECOMMENDATIONS!!!!
If you found this review helpful please indicate so.
Thank You.

A good sequel,

And leaves me ready for the next! Hoping for more character development but these guys don’t disappoint!

Like this series

I really like this series. It gets better and better I would like to spend more time on adventures with this team

Yet another winner by Brett Battles!!

Town at the Edge of Darkness is the second suspense mystery/thriller in the Excoms series. It is set in the small town of Bradbury, Washington where a woman is missing. The Excoms series has has five protagonists led by Ananke who is an assassin who appeared in as a major character in novel #9, The Buried, in the Jonathan Quinn series by Brett Battles. The Excoms team is controlled by a mysterious administrator. This novel was released in Kindle format free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited on December 12, 2017, so I read it then. It is even better Allyson Johnson narrating it. The novel starts a bit slowly, but the action and suspense picks up quickly.

Author Brett Battles is a remarkable writer who released his first novel titled The Cleaner (Jonathan Quinn series) in 2007 and has now released 32 novels all except the standalone The Pull of Gravity and the YA novel Here Comes Mr. Trouble are available at Audible. 30 are in my Audible library. There are six different series of which the espionage Jonathan Quinn series is best known. The series include the science fiction Rewinder Thrillers and the post apocalyptic Project Eden series. The remarkable fact is that all of Brett Battles novels are outstanding.

If you like novels by Vince Flynn, Tom Clancy, Lisa Gardner, Nelson DeMille, Karin Slaughter, Mark Greaney, Tom Wood, Ben Coes, Marc Cameron, or Brad Taylor, you owe it to yourself to give books written by Brett Battles a try.

nice, light, exciting but unsurprising

This small Washington town has a secret, a really big nightmare secret. Tasha figured it out but was caught before she could pass it on. The mismatched excoms team is sent in to find her, and they are caught up in the mess!

I think the main horror of the plot was supposed to be a shock and a surprise, but it wasn't for me. Nevertheless, the whole thing was interesting and made a good listen. This ends up being far lighter than the Quinn books. That's okay; powder puff special ops is fun too, and Battles' books run a whole gamut of intensity and gore.

We learn more about each of the members of this nameless group. I always thought Ananka was Russian, but turns out she's Black. Must have missed that in the previous books. Rick really shines in this book. And Rick mentions that the team needs a name. That will be something fun to look forward to in the next book!

The narration is pretty good.

A Sequel That Works

Did the plot keep you on the edge of your seat? How?

Well in a way it did. There are five members of the group, and it wasn't out of the question that, given the plot, one of them might have been 'retired', so to speak. So during certain scenes I tensed up a bit.

Which scene was your favorite?

Pretty much whenever Ricky was on the stage, he livened things up.

Any additional comments?

This is better than the first book, by a decent margin (and remember, the first book was good enough to get me to buy this one). The big reason is Ricky, no Denver omelettes here thank goodness. Brett actually showed him to be good at his job, and while his goofiness was still present, it never interfered with his tasks. It makes up for the others being given little personality, especially Ananka (or however you spell her name). In the next one Brett should make her a little less perfect, and a little less dull. Still, I really liked this story, and will happily download Ex-Com's 3, whenever it happens to come out.

Good read and great narration..

Ananka, Rosario, Liesel, Dylan and Ricky have a new assignment and this one was even better than the last. It was about finding human traffickers, who really did more than traffic humans but you’ll have to read this book to find out.

I will say that they talked a little bit more like adults in this story but not much. And this was funnier than the last, too. Our heroes had some really great lines. Especially Ananke, she said the sweetest things just before she shot someone or knocked someone unconscious.

They were all such a variety of heroes, too. Ananke is black, Rosario is Spanish, Liesel is German, Dylan is Irish and Ricky was… Well, Ricky was just the hunter the Administrator got out of a 10 year stretch in prison. Great group. This series does get better with each book.

As to the narration: Actually, Allyson Johnson didn’t do as good on the men’s voices in this book BUT her emotions were outstanding. She laughed, cried, whispered, screamed in pain, she did it all. Wonderful narration, even with the men not sounding all that great, it was mostly close enough.