Escalante

A Novella Featuring the Fixer

By: Andrew Vaillencourt

Narrated by: Jay Ben Markson

There's a stranger in town, and he just wants to be left alone.

But Dockside doesn't like strangers, and the dirty old town never leaves anyone alone. Not emotionally scarred top-secret ex-army cyborgs, and certainly not good cops with bad habits.

Join New Boston's most famous fixer for his first week in the most dangerous part of town. All he wanted was a quiet place to hide, but now he has to team up with the last good cop in Dockside if they expect to stop a gang war and protect the hard-working folks just trying to make an honest living.

It's good cop versus, bad cop, gang leader versus mobster, and Roland Tankowicz versus everybody in a high-stakes contest for control of Dockside. He may be brand new to the job, but the smart money is on everybody's favorite Army surplus cyborg as he doubles down on the deadliest game in Dockside:

Escalante.

©2017 Andrew Vaillencourt (P)2018 The Slide Rule Group

A good shot in the arm of Dockside Days

This was a short but excellent story , and I like that it wasn't pretentious or overblown. It's just a taste of the world , Enough to whet the appetite for the advenures . Makes a great car listen or plane listen, Gives a backgrounder on the good guy to hate Rodney and the world.

i'm usually a picky SOB but this is really great.

hoping people who share my taste read this review and try the book-- i go to reviews all the time before i buy, and appreciate when people explain (without spoilers) why they like said book.... okay. so, my favorite author is raymond chandler. many great gumshoe/hard-boiled characters have followed philip marlowe, and some are great, some are fun, and most are terrible. (yes, I know, Sam Spade was technically the true godfather of hard boiled fiction, but I'm a Marlowe man). Anyways. I love the tropes, but it's rare people put a new spin on it. This author did it perfectly. Sure, we've seen cyber-noir before, but most are awful. If 'Altered Carbon' is a 10, I would give this novella a 9. I mean, it's dope. I'm hard to please, and half the books I buy on audible I stop listening to out of boredom. Try this. if you love Philip Marlowe and Takeshi Kovacs, this is the next anti-hero you've been waiting for.

Good, but not for me..

This was a short intro to Roland Tankowicz, a cyborg. He's almost 8 feet tall and just moved into town and just wants to be left alone. Fat chance of the happening. He wasn't there 10 minutes when 4 gang members thought they'd take him on. Yeah, they didn't last long.

Anyway, I'm just so weird that I won't be moving on with that series. When an author describes the MC I can picture him in my mind BUT I can't picture someone with a bald head and a pug nose. I have no idea why an author wants to have someone that looks like that and make a series about him. Anyway, it was an enjoyable short story it's just not for me. Like I said, I'm weird.

No romance and the F-bomb was used 20 times.

As for the narration: Jay Ben Markson was just great. His voices for every person was perfect.