Booklog 26/2025: John Scalzi: Travel by Bullet – Despatcher #3 – Audiobook

Audiobook narrated by Zachary Quinto

Tony Valdez is a dispatcher. He kills people for a living. No, not like that. In this world those people murdered (as opposed to those who die naturally, or by accident, or suicide) come back to life, reappearing in the place they’ve always felt safest. So, licensed dispatchers can kill those maimed in an accident or on the verge of death because of (say) surgery that’s gone wrong, and they’ll reappear (probably in their own beds) to have another chance of living, restored to the condition they were in a few hours earlier. Tony is busy doing his job in a hospital (which includes counselling families about when dispatch is not right for their loved ones – ones with terminal illness for instance) when he’s called to the emergency room, to an old friend who has been badly injured falling out of a car on the freeway. Before the friend is dispatched, he secretly gives Tony a crypto-wallet, and from then on Tony is involved in a world of schemes and billion-dollar plots with vast cryptocurrency accounts in the balance, and some of Chicago’s wealthiest billionaires vying with each other for both the crypto-wallet and Tony’s friend. It’s a tightly-knitted plot and Zachary Quinto is perfect to voice Tony Valdez. In fact, if they ever film this, he IS Tony Valdez – and I’d like to see that.

Booklog 27/2025: Adrian Tchaikovsky: The Expert System’s Brother – Expert Systems #1 – Audiobook

Narrated by Shaun Grindell.

Handry is severed from his village and his twin sister by an unfortunate incident and forced to wander from village to village as a starving outcast, suddenly unable to stomach most of his world’s regular food. Eventually he stumbles across a village willing to offer food in return for work, and there he meets another outcast, but one who seems to know what’s going on. The world is not what it seems. Their origins are far stranger, almost unbelievable, except there is proof. Things come to head when Hendry’s sister follows him. The story is interesting, though it’s a bit of a slow starter, revelations not coming until well into the book. When they do come, it all makes sense. However, what makes it difficult to like is the narrator, Shaun Grindell. Sorry to say I found his reading lifeless to the extent that, had it not been a short book, I might have given up, or at least found a written version instead of an audio one.

Booklog 28/2025: Tony Lee: Dodge and Twist, a sequel to Oliver Twist (Revised edition) – Audiobook

Full cast recording featuring Stephen Mangan, Matt Lucas and many more.

I don’t generally like full cast recordings, but this was done well, more like a radio play, which, indeed, was its first incarnation. This is a revised edition, ten years on from the first one. Twelve years after the events in Dickens’ original book, Oliver Twist is back on the streets of London, penniless because his inheritance from the recently deceased Mr Brownlow, his adoptive father, has been blocked by missing papers. He meets up with Jack Dawkins, the Artful Dodger, an enters a scheme to get his rightful money, even though it means jointing a plan to steal the world’s most valuable diamond from a safe in the British Museum. There are returning characters and new ones (Nancy’s sister). Just when Oliver starts to trust Dodger, the ghost of Fagin, in Dodger’s head, twists plans. It’s not just wealth Dodger is after, but revenge – for Fagin. Things get really dodgy and twisty before the final showdown.