Shadow Detective Urban Fantasy Horror Series: Books 1-3

By: William Massa

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Name’s Mike Raven, but the world knows me as the Shadow Detective.

I was ten when demons tore my world apart. Since then, I’ve made it my business to hunt the things that crawl out of the dark. Trained by a legendary monster slayer and armed with an arsenal of mystical weapons, I track and destroy the forces that prey on the innocent.

But hunting monsters leaves scars. And if you stare too long into the abyss, don’t be surprised when it starts staring back.

The Shadow Detective Boxed Set packs the first three supernatural thrillers—Cursed City, Soul Catcher, and Blood Rain—into one killer volume. Lock, load, and step into the shadows.

Raven as a monster hunter

I like the story so don’t take my next words wrong.

Raven SUCKS as a monster hunter. It seems most of the issues comes from his bad decisions. He is a bit lax for the line of business he is in.

A decent story with a sad AI reader

It was a pretty decent story would’ve be better with someone reading it instead of the AI. Makes me wonder how long it’ll take before AI will mimic people in Audible books not this a very basic,utilitarian sound. Sadly, I know it will be double edged knife, that cuts as much as it helps, but it would really help these audio books.

Tedious and Repetitive

This book should have been called The Prague Protocol: A Burned Out Profiler’s Guide to Recovery, Redemption and Romance. The thriller parts of this story played second fiddle to situations circumstances that were repeated over and over again. Virtual voice did not help with mispronunciations of key terms, including the crime fighting team’s abbreviated name.

This series could be one book if the same phrases weren’t repeated almost verbatim in his own thoughts, journal entries, a friend and some other person. I listened to all the books with hopes things would get better… they didn’t . This series was tedious to listen to. I found portions that would be a good place to bring the stories to a close. But, they would keep going on and on.

This set would have been a much better listen if the author focused more on the crimes, varied the victimology (in the first two stories), and made it less of a self-help story for the protagonist.

Good content, but the AI voice takes away from the experience.

The AI voice is so unbearable, the voice has no inflection and very monotone. It takes away from the story and makes it very boring to listen to.

Highly Derivative Story Read by AI

The book has a lot of what I like about Urban Fantasy, but it sometimes feels like it's trying too hard and too "on the nose". Moreover, the genre is already pretty heavy, so when I listen to this one, it feels very derivative. Sadly, the word "sharp" appears as an adjective often enough in the book that makes me feel it's written by an LLM.

And, worst of all, the AI voice is almost devoid of inflection or emotion.