Vanishing Games

Title: Vanishing Games

Author: Roger Hobbs [Website][Facebook][Twitter] ; Read by Jake Weber [IMDb]

Publisher: Books on Tape (Random House)

Series: Ghostman, Bk 2

ISBN: 9781101888360

Length: 9 discs ; approximately 11 hours

Obtained: Library copy

Why this book?:

This book needed the circs and seemed up my alley, so I listened to the first book, Ghostman.  Then I could listen to this one.

Comments:

Like the first book, this one has some very graphic violence.  Such as beheading with wire contraptions (that they also had on the TV show Quantico, so I was able to test how my imagination held up to a visual demonstration.)

Jack's mentor Angela has finally contacted him after a 6 year stretch of silence.  After 6 years of not knowing whether someone is dead or alive, do you trust them?  Especially when you trust no one?  And how do you get out of a mess when you have multiple enemies after you, you don't know who any of them are, and they seem to know much more about you?

Why you do what you've trained to do, you be a ghostman, becoming someone new and different in seconds.  Different name, posture and bearing, voice and background...  For me, these transformations are one of the most interesting parts of these stories.

Book three, City of Sirens, is due out in 2018.  A bit of a wait, and with my track record, this gap makes continuing the series iffy.  I'm just now listening to an audiobook that, when I read it's predecessor, I said I couldn't wait for... in 2013.  However, story-wise, I'm definitely interested to hear more of Jack and his adventures.

Ghostman

Title: Ghostman

Author: Roger Hobbs [Website][Facebook][Twitter] ; Read by Jake Weber [IMDb]

Publisher: Books on Tape (Random House)

Series: Ghostman, Bk 1

ISBN: 9780385361767

Length: 10 discs ; 11 hours, 52 minutes

Why this book?:

The second audiobook, Vanishing Games, hadn't circulated yet.  And has a thief in it.  But I couldn't listen to that one without listening to this one.  Plus, it filled the "Title with one word" box on my Summer Reading Bingo Sheet.

Comments:

First on the narration... My very first thought was, ugh.  I don't like this.  It's too gritty and reminds me of my vague memories of the David Baldacci book I listened too (True Blue, narrated by Ron McLarty and listened to in 2012).  So I looked at the back of the case, saw that the narrator, Jake Weber, is the same guy who played the husband in Medium, and decided to be more tolerant.  And that changed everything, because I quickly became involved in the story, and the voice turns out to be perfect for the character Jack.

Now, this story is certainly gritty.  It's extremely graphic with every description of blood and gore.  Some of the violence, described in detail, was horrifying. (In particular, there was a description of the murder of a child that still makes my stomach churn remembering it.  I want to use words like cruel and merciless.  I understand any murder of a child could be described using these words, but this one included torture and ... ugh).  And the descriptions of the guns, etc. made me feel like I was listening to another sniper book.  

But I was caught up in how Jack was going to come out of this mess alive and on top (because surely he would).  I was not so enthralled with the background story (set 5 years ago and interspersed with the current story), but it certainly served a purpose explaining what strings held Jack and kept him from being the free agent and ghostman he intended to be.

Anyway, I ended up listening to it straight through, finishing it pretty quickly as far as audiobooks go (though I mostly kept to just actual driving time and didn't sit in the car for hours at a time just to listen).  I intend to listen to the next book, Vanishing Games, but I have a bit of a pile with audiobooks right now, so it may not be as soon as hoped.