Goodbye California

By: Alistair MacLean

Narrated by: Jeff Harding

Reissue of the classic tale of terrorism, where a criminal fanatic is hell-bent on blasting San Francisco into the ocean, from the acclaimed master of action and suspense.

'Earthquake country,' said the Professor. 'San Francisco is geologically and seismologically a city that waits to die. Los Angeles is ringed by earthquake centres – seven massive quakes so far. We have no idea where the next, the monster, will hit…'

…until a criminal fanatic kidnaps a nuclear scientist and builds his own atomic bombs. If exploded on California's fault lines they could trigger off the mightiest earthquake of them all – killing half its population and dumping the entire city of San Francisco into the sea.

Goodbye California…

©1977 HarperCollinsPublishers (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

'His best since H.M.S. Ulysses' Sunday Times

'Holds the reader to the final suspenseful page' Sunday Telegraph

‘The most successful British novelist of his time’ Jack Higgins

Still my favorite

This is an incredibly biased review, Goodbye California was the first novel of MacLean’s that I read almost 40 years ago, making him my all time favorite author, an opinion still unchanged today. Objectively looking at the story of nuclear blackmail and earthquakes is not the best this master of suspense ever wrote, but to this day it’s thrilling and entertaining. So when this book became available for preorder, I didn’t even listen first the sample but smashed the buy button as hard as I could.

The reading performance is perfectly adequate, and more fluent Than Jonathon Oliver. Some of the voices are a bit to hard to distinguish from each other. And there is on duplicate recording in the last quarter aside from that a very good audio book.