Recent "reads"

Dead Lines, by Greg Bear (Audiobook). Since I now have a technologically advanced, modern vehicle with a CD player, I decided to experiment with listening to audiobooks on my various commutes and roadtrips. It's rather appropriate that the first one I listened to was a story involving a new means of voice communication.

Dead Lines is an intriguing thriller, but having listened to it as an audiobook, I find that it's hard to comment on it as a book. But here goes.

The protagonist is an aging Hollywood writer, soft-porn photographer and director of Z-grade movies whose career has long since gone the way of the dodo. He's been on the skids ever since the unsolved murder of his daughter and his subsequent divorce. He earns a precarious living by running errands for a reclusive, filthy-rich studio magnate who lives with his trophy wife in one of those extravagantly elaborate overblown Hollywood estates where the husband and wife can have separate his-and-hers mansions, complete with accumulated bricabrac from long-dead celluloid heroes and assorted stories of debauchery and death.

Into this happy scenario arrives a promoter seeking funding for a new kind of telecommunications device. It's an entirely new technology, one which goes "beneath" the known electromagnetic spectrum into a previously unused and unexplored expanse of bandwidth.

As people begin using these new devices, strange events start occurring. And at that point I draw the no-spoiler curtain across any further revelations.

I enjoyed the story. The reader's characterization of different voices for different characters helped both to reinforce their personalities and to indicate which character was speaking. A good listen, although I find it difficult to say whether I would have had the same reaction if I had read it in traditional form.