Review: Vengeance by A. J. Scudiere

Nine years ago, Clay­more Beller tried to do the right thing. It was the last thing he did. In retal­i­a­tion for his efforts, his mafia bosses laid waste to his fam­ily. Only the youngest — Cyn­thia — came up fighting.

Three years ago, Lee Maxwell made the same error. His wife and daugh­ter paid for his mis­take. In a haze of booze and regret, Lee disappeared.

Now, Owen Dun­ham is fol­low­ing the trail of the ‘Grudge Ninja’ — only all the evi­dence is false and the pro­fil­ers can’t get their heads around any­thing except the obvi­ous fact that the Ninja is extract­ing a deadly revenge for an old wrong.

As the Ninja gets bolder and far more dan­ger­ous, Owen is forced to rec­og­nize that he hasn’t always made the best deci­sions — he’s spent far too much time try­ing to be right. Even as he  ques­tions whether bring­ing in the ninja is the right thing to do, the voice in the back of his head is telling him it will make his career …

I started lis­ten­ing to A.J. Scud­eire’s Res­o­nance and had planned on lis­ten­ing to the audio movie ver­sion of this book as well until my car stereo broke.  I can only imag­ine how much bet­ter this book would have been lis­ten­ing to it.  It was a great read, and pulls you into the story from the very first chap­ter.  It has intrigue, decep­tion, three main char­ac­ters who inter­twine sto­ries with easy and it doesn’t stop until the very last page.

As I approached the last bit, I had the gnaw­ing fear that some­how it wouldn’t end very well, but let me tell you, Scud­iere keeps it up right until the end.  It’s no won­der that the audio movie is up for two 2011 Audie Awards!  The win­ners will be announced dur­ing the book filled week of May when the Book Expo Amer­ica and Book Blog­ger Con­ven­tion take place in addi­tion to NY Book Week.  If you have an oppor­tu­nity, please vote for Vengeance in the cat­e­gories of best Thriller/​Suspense and best Audio Drama.

So what is an audio movie? Well it’s just what it sounds like.  You lis­ten as the unabridged story is read by not one per­son, but mul­ti­ple voice actors each play­ing a dif­fer­ent char­ac­ter and in addi­tion to that they have sound effects and a score to go along as well.  Since I haven’t been able to lis­ten to Vengeance that way yet, I can’t say just how good it is, but I am lov­ing Res­o­nance (Scudiere’s other audio movie) and don’t think I’m putting myself out on a limb by say­ing Vengeance will be just as good if not better.

As a bonus to my read­ers, I’ve been given the oppor­tu­nity to give away the MP3 down­load of the audio movie, and one lucky win­ner will receive the lim­ited edi­tion, USB flash drive with the whole audio movie on it.

Keep an eye out next week for your chance to enter to win this unique USB audio movie as well as down­load your copy of the MP3 files.  Until then, you can down­load and read the first two chap­ters of the book:

Click here to down­load the first two chap­ters of Vengeance.

So what do you think of the idea of audio movies? Have you lis­tened to any of them already?  Would you rec­om­mend them?  I’m going to need some more to check out once I’ve fin­ished Res­o­nance and given Vengeance a listen.

I would also like to give a shout out to Marissa at JKSCom­mu­ni­ca­tions for giv­ing me the oppor­tu­nity to review not only Vengeance, but Res­o­nance as well in both book for­mat and audio movie.  And with­out her, you, lucky reader, wouldn’t have the chance to win this USB drive!  Thanks Marissa!