Title: The Easytown Novels 1-3
Author: Brian Parker
Narrator: Daniel Penz
Link: https://www.audible.com/pd/The-Easytown-Novels-Books-1-3-Audiobook/B07SYMHC3W
Summary
The Easytown Novels create a frighteningly real near future world beset by climate change, social depravity, moral ambiguity, and corporate greed. Easytown is city with a thousand stories and the hard-nosed homicide detective, Zach Forrest, is determined to learn them all.
Book 1 – The Immorality Clause: Easytown’s robotic pleasure clubs are a serial killer’s playground.
The futuristic slum in eastern New Orleans is a violent place where any vice can be satisfied – for a price. As long as the taxes are paid and tourists continue to flock to the city, businesses are allowed to operate as they see fit. When a string of grisly murders rocks the city, homicide detective Zach Forrest must hunt down the killer responsible before they strike again.
Book 2 – Tears of a Clone: Torture tourism is an illegal sport in Easytown – unless the victim is a clone, then nobody cares.
When Detective Forrest discovers the mutilated bodies of three clones in a garbage compactor, he’s shocked to learn of the multi-million dollar industry of torture tourism. He embarks on an unauthorized investigation and discovers that the truth behind the clone murders is more terrifying than he’d imagined.
Book 3 – West End Droids & East End Dames: Everything comes crashing down on Forrest when a rampaging cyborg attacks, disrupting his investigation into the death of a lowly thumper club doorman who knew too much. Before he can determine his next move, a beautiful evidence clerk lands on his doorstep and forces her way into his life. Meanwhile, the precinct chief tasks him to track down and stop the street doctors who build the abominations.
But, will doing so cost Zach more than he’d expected?
My Review
5/5 Stars
I am still trying to decide how to word this review. It’s never easy to review an entire series at once, especially one that was out there as this one.
In the future, New Orleans has a section called Easytown where the French Quarter used to be. This is a spot that specializes in nightlife, sex clubs in particular. Except these are no ordinary clubs. They’re filled with sex robots. When patrons start to be murdered, the protagonist Zachary, has to find out who’s responsible.
I loved this series because not only does it have a noir feeling, it holds an interesting balance of technology like cyborgs and artificial intelligence, but it also has plenty of modern day issues like drugs and murder.
Zach is a very shoot first, ask questions later type of main character. He’s confident and not afraid to follow his gut. I didn’t like him at first, but I warmed up to him the longer I listened. All the characters, in fact, are interesting in their own ways. I liked Zach’s assistant Andi in particular.
There are some things in the futuristic world that made me laugh. Such creative worldbuilding all around.
The narrator did an absolutely fantastic job as well. He brought the stories to life.
This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.
Author Kayla Krantz 