Audiobooks narrated by David Bendena

The Seven Keys have been collected, and the world created solely to entertain has come alive. The one who gains control over them will rule Sphere. Who will it be—the Demon King, the digitized players, the corporations, or the people hiding under the masks of the Seven Brothers? The stakes are higher than ever, and the merchant’s life is once again at risk—after all, he holds one of the Keys that grant the power to create and destroy worlds at will. Together with Weldy, who has become a Lord of Libros in her own right, Cat will have to brave the most dangerous place in all of Sphere—the Cloud of Bones. His smarts, his cunning, his luck, and the Law of Balance are on his side. And behind him is the might of the Starlight Fleet.

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

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The Dreamweaver

They say that the Sphere of Worlds has no limits and that its players enter a new universe brimming with mysteries. And this universe is now readying to defend itself. Whoever has got involved in the game just can't stop anymore. In the search for the Keys, Cat and Weldy set off for the Abyss—the netherworlds of the Sphere—where Cat is about to play against the strongest of all the oracles: the legendary Demon King. And the stake in the game is horrendously simple: Cat's own life.

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

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Drums & Demons: The Tragic Journey of Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon was the greatest rock drummer of all-time. Just ask the world-famous musicians who played with him—John Lennon, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, Frank Zappa, Steely Dan, Ringo Starr, Harry Nilsson, Joe Cocker, and many more. They knew him for his superior playing, extraordinary training and technique, preternatural intuition, perfect sense of time, and his “big fill”—the mathematically-precise clatter that exploded like detonating fireworks on his drum breaks. And as bestselling author and award-winning journalist Joel Selvin reveals, the story of Jim Gordon is the most brilliant, turbulent, and wrenching rock opera ever. This riveting narrative follows Gordon as the very chemicals in his brain that gifted him also destroyed him. His head crowded with a hellish gang of voices screaming at him, demanding obedience, Gordon descended from the absolute heights of the rock world—playing with the most famous musicians of his generation—to working with a Santa Monica dive-bar band for $30 a night. And then he committed the most shocking crime in rock history. With full cooperation from the late Gordon's family and based on his trademark extensive, detailed research, Joel Selvin’s account is at once an epic journey through an artist’s monumental musical contributions, a rollicking history of rock drumming, and a terrifying downward spiral into the unimaginable madness that Gordon fought a valiant but losing battle against. One of the great untold stories of rock is finally being told.

Joel Selvin (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

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Black Hearts and Painted Guns: A Battalion's Journey into Iraq's Triangle of Death

Kelly Eads joined the 101st Airborne Division soon after 9/11, his experience reflecting the patriotism and commitment of so many young men and women who responded to the attack. He deployed to Iraq twice with the 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. Early in their deployment to Iraq, the 2nd Battalion brought the fight directly to the enemy by setting up patrol bases in the local areas where they lived and operated. Soon they built a reputation for themselves, becoming known to the enemy as the Black Hearts—the 502nd had been distinguished on the battlefield by black hearts on their helmets since World War II. Their Scout Platoon became known as Painted Guns due to their practice of camouflaging their rifles. During Eads’ deployments, the battalion would experience thousands of Improvised Explosive Devices and firefights. They would spend countless hours in blistering 120-degree desert heat, controlling roads, preventing enemy freedom of movement, and hunting enemy mortar teams and terror cells. With the help of Dan Morgan, an Infantry officer who deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan as a commander and operations officer, Eads takes listeners on a rollercoaster of combat experiences during the hunt for the most violent terrorist in Iraq, Ab? Mu??ab Zarq?w?, bringing to life the painstaking and horrid details of combat in a sectarian war. He tells the story of the soldiers’ camaraderie, built through adversity, and the love of family that sustained them.

Daniel S. Morgan, Kelly Eads (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

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The Devil Archetype

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

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Battle for the North

Pandorum is launching a massive offensive, aiming to destroy Cat and his clan. As they’re blazing through everything in their path, thousands of players clash in battle, and the biggest alliances of Sphere join the fray. Can Cat stay on the sidelines? After all, he’s able to buy and sell almost anything in the game—even victory itself. Cat fights his own war in economics and trade. Which role will the merchant play in a bloody war fated to go down in the history of the game as the Battle for the North?

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

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Mister Lullaby

The small town of Harrod’s Reach has seen its fair share of the macabre, especially inside the decrepit old train tunnel around which the town was built. After a young boy, Sully Dupree, is injured in the abandoned tunnel and left in a coma, the townspeople are determined to wall it up. Deputy sheriff Beth Gardner is reluctant to buy into the superstitions until she finds two corpses at the tunnel’s entrance, each left with strange calling cards inscribed with old lullabies. Soon after, Sully Dupree briefly awakens from his coma. Before falling back into his slumber, Sully manages to give his older brother a message. Sully's mind, since the accident, has been imprisoned on the other side of the tunnel in Lalaland, a grotesque and unfamiliar world inhabited by evil mythical creatures of sleep. Sully is trapped there with hundreds of other coma patients, all desperately fighting to keep the evils of the dream world from escaping into the waking world. Elsewhere, a man troubled by his painful youth has for years been hearing a voice in his head he calls Mr. Lullaby, and he has finally started to act on what that voice is telling him—to kill any coma patient he can find, quickly. Something is waking up in the tunnel—something is trying to get through. And Mr. Lullaby is coming.

J. H. Markert (Author), David Bendena, Lauren Ezzo (Narrator)

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Shadow Seer

Meet Cat. He thinks everything has its price. You can pay in gold, or you pay in steel. And for the right price, even the entire Sphere of Worlds can be bought. Ever the merchant, he pays in souls, freeing the Goddess of Darkness in the astral fortress of Pandorum and becoming the archnemesis of the most powerful alliance in all of Sphere. Even as an enormous bounty is placed on his head with hunters trailing his every move, he never wavers. His patron, the God of Shadows, sends Cat to the twilight world of the Hole to find the third of the seven Keys. There, the merchant will have to traverse the dangerous waters of an underground ocean to reach the Isle of Madness, proving once again to be worthy of divine favor.

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Gene of Ancients

Now that Cat has discovered his sword’s secret and received the task to collect the Seven Keys, he’s not in a hurry to complete the new quest. Why would he care about the future of the world when he has much more exciting things to do, like claiming his place in the clan, participating in the redistributing of trade influence, and just plain making money? Cat starts building his own trading empire—and ends up getting involved in an all-out economic war. Having gotten the taste of real money, he travels to the Bazaar, the world’s biggest marketplace at the crossroads of trade routes, intending to finally show all the Sphere’s tycoons what he’s capable of. Cat is serious about making it to the top, earning influence, money, new risky deals, new friends and new enemies in the process. And once he finally makes it big, he suddenly gains a new patron: a stranger who turns out of be the god of shadows, rogues, and traders who takes interest in the brazen merchant. Following the route his new patron god has shown him, Cat arrives at the legendary Helt Acor, the Endless Paths of the Ancients whose finest web permeates the very fabric of Creation. Their tunnels form the most perilous dungeon in the whole of the Sphere. Only the one in possession of the Ancient Gene can tread in the footsteps of the long-perished race and find the most amazing of all treasures. And in the end of their journey, the daring adventure-seekers should brace themselves for a surprise…

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Gospel of the Hold Steady: How a Resurrection Really Feels

On January 22, 2003, four men stepped onto a stage in Brooklyn and did something no one else was doing at that time, in that place. They played rock 'n' roll: old-fashioned rock 'n' roll with skyscraping riffs and sloppy solos, topped with extraordinary lyrics about an out-of-focus America, blurred by pills and powders, of crime and fear and desperation and redemption. Twenty years later, The Hold Steady are one of America's most beloved rock bands, famed for live shows that turn unbelievers into converts and for a catalog filled with some of the most exciting yet poetic music of the twenty-first century. To mark those twenty years, The Hold Steady tell their full story. An oral history, based on interviews with everyone who has played in the band, and those who have worked with them over the course of their career, The Gospel of the Hold Steady addresses all the triumphs and setbacks of The Hold Steady's career in the band's own words?from high times to near deaths, from the brink of splitting to their current renaissance. The Gospel of The Hold Steady is completed by essays about America's greatest bar band by writers Rob Sheffield, Laura Barton, Isaac Fitzgerald, and Michael Hann, as well as the thoughts and memories of The Unified Scene?the fans who have helped define the band's identity over the years. This is a book for anyone who understands that the magic of rock 'n' roll happens on a stage in a small room with voices raised from the crowd.

Michael Hann, The Hold Steady (Author), David Bendena, David Kissinger, Haley Taylor, Kim Bretton, Lane Hakel, Pat Grimes, Pete Cross, Qarie Marshall (Narrator)

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The Starlight Sword

Cat is a wannabe merchant who specializes in procuring in-game valuables to sell for real money. He's a cunning trickster who wriggles his way out of trouble thanks to his quick wit and his trading talents, and his credo is “Anyone can be bought provided the price is right. He starts from scratch, using every opportunity to advance his plans. The first book in the Rogue Merchant series, The Starlight Sword is the story of this common trader’s rise to becoming the world’s newest legend, the most famous merchant in the entire Sphere of the Worlds—a worldwide multiverse comprised of hundreds of worlds, from horrible Infernos ruled by Demon Lords to mechanical worlds inhabited by sentient constructs. In the Sphere of the Worlds, gigantic markets have sprouted at the crossroads of trade routes, and players use astral ships to travel between worlds to avoiding having to venture into the perilous underground tunnels of the Endless Paths. Dozens of powerful clans share this delicious pie, scheming or waging wars against each other. A classic might-and-magic-style LitRPG series with elements of manapunk, the Rogue Merchant series focuses on the economics of this game world, including various trade methods, such as regular and auction trading, as well as social and political interactions between clans and players. There's plenty of intrigue and espionage, betrayal, trade wars, besieged castles, and epic air battles of flying ships!

Roman Prokofiev (Author), David Bendena, Pete Cross (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Nightmare Man

Blackwood mansion looms, surrounded by nightmare pines, atop the hill over the small town of New Haven. Ben Bookman, bestselling novelist and heir to the Blackwood estate, spent a weekend at the ancestral home to finish writing his latest horror novel, The Scarecrow. Now, on the eve of the book’s release, the terrible story within begins to unfold in real life. Detective Mills arrives at the scene of a gruesome murder: a family butchered and bundled inside cocoons stitched from corn husks and hung from the rafters of a barn, eerily mirroring the opening of Bookman’s latest novel. When another family is killed in a similar manner, Mills and his daughter, rookie detective Samantha Blue, are determined to find the link to the book—and the killer—before the story reaches its chilling climax. As the series of “Scarecrow crimes” continues to mirror the book, Ben quickly becomes the prime suspect. He can’t remember much from the night he finished writing the novel, but he knows he wrote it in The Atrium, his grandfather’s forbidden room full of numbered books, thousands of books without words. As Ben digs deep into Blackwood’s history, he learns he may have triggered a release of something trapped long ago—and it won’t stop with the horrors buried within the pages of his book.

J. H. Markert (Author), David Bendena (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by David Bendena