The Courier Audiobook By Gerald Brandt cover art

The Courier

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The Courier

By: Gerald Brandt
Narrated by: Ali Ahn, James Colby
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Buy for $19.86

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Kris Ballard is a motorcycle courier. A nobody. Level Two trash in a multilevel city that stretches from San Francisco to the Mexican border - a land where corporations make all the rules. A runaway since the age of 14, Kris struggled to set up her life, barely scraping by, working hard to make it without anyone's help. But a late-day delivery changes everything when she walks in on the murder of one of her clients.

Now she's stuck with a mysterious package that everyone wants. It looks like the corporations want Kris gone and are willing to go to almost any length to make it happen. Hunted, scared, and alone, she retreats to the only place she knows she can hide: the Level One streets. Fleeing from people who seem to know her every move, she is rescued by Miller - a member of an underground resistance group - only to be pulled deeper into a world she doesn't understand. Together Kris and Miller barely manage to stay one step ahead of the corporate killers, but it's only a matter of time until Miller's resources and their luck run out.

©2015 Gerald Brandt (P)2016 Recorded Books Science Fiction Cyberpunk Adventure Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Hard Science Fiction
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the story was very good it held my interest from the beginning and didn't let me go great characters and the plot was awesome can go wrong with a apocalyptic story line

the main character

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The story was fun and engaging. The author did a good job. My only complaint was the story didn't actually have that motorcycle in it.

Fun story

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Overall great listen, wish characters were a bit more fleshed out. This is one of those books that would make a great movie if ever produced. Hoping to start the next book on this series soon!

Enjoyable listen

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Liked the feel and description of San Angeles. enjoyed the main characters, had some real depth of character. Fast moving and one challenge followed another. Corporate characters were a little too sadistic and somewhat characatures vs protagonists. Overall a good read that kept my interest.

Teen takes on corporate evil

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The protagonist spends most of the book being a dumb kid. I shouldn’t really blame her for being a dumb kid, she has never learned any better, but as someone who has lived on the streets, she should have a little more street smarts than it seems she does. So the short version of this book is: a dumb kid, does dumb kid things, and takes naïve and brain dead decisions, over and over and over again, and still manages to come out on top, somehow.
still, she is likable, which goes a long way to making you want to forgive her repeated idiotic choices. And she meets some interesting side characters.
The villains are a little bit one dimensional, except maybe for Devon and the president.
Speaking of the president, this could have used one extra chapter at the end from the president’s perspective, to explain how things went the way they did for him and the company. maybe that’s in another book? I don’t know, but that aspect of the story feels a little bit incomplete, because even with the way things went, he should have been able to do better than it sounds like he might’ve done. I don’t want to be more clear than that or I will give spoilers.

Not every question is answered in here, and that’s fine. A lot of predictable things end predictably, and that’s less fine, but perhaps the characters will grow in future books and become less predictable and have less predictable outcomes.

The main character isn’t the only one who does things that anyone who has seen even one spy movie should know better than to do. Something that really really annoyed me, was supposedly professional Nigel, holding a covert meeting with a covert (known to be an active target) source, carrying very important, apparently valuable, and die before reading, secret information, in an incredibly public hotel lobby restaurant. This ends exactly as you expect it to end. I can only say Nigel deserved what happened to him because he had clearly risen above the level of his incompetency.

This story bills itself as cyberpunk. It’s got the overpowered corporations, and general dystopia of cyberpunk. However other than the embedded tracking devices secretly implanted in people, and the tech that subverts same, there’s no cyber in the punk.
It doesn’t even occur to anyone to recharge the batteries on the signal blockers, for Wintermute’s sake. When they run out, the powers that be track you again, and you’re dead. If only they thought to put a USB jack on those things.

The writing is good, engaging, and the editing is top-notch.

Let’s talk about the narration.
I thought Ali was pretty good, this was the first time I’ve ever read something she narrated. She is a little morose overall, but talented.
James was also pretty good, also a first time reading him, but he had one very annoying characteristic that made me drop a star off of the narration. His pauses. He had such long pauses at the end of sentences, and sometimes in the middle of them, that I can only imagine he was pausing recording to do retakes. That’s fine, the best in the business do the same thing at least at the end of sentences, but they are better at making those pauses feel natural instead of over long. The result is very choppy delivery from James, that detracts from his otherwise well done narration.

If you found my review helpful, please mark it as such. Which we can finally now do in the app, which is excellent.

Mixed bag, but overall not bad

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