Audiobooks narrated by David Carpenter

I Never Met a Rattlesnake I Didn't Like Audiobook

"David Carpenter’s collection of essays explores a city boy’s love of the wild, a passion that has enriched his life from boyhood. At 80, this irrepressible Saskatchewan raconteur examines his intense fascination with predators large and small, and his awe in the face of the variety of creatures that may be out to get us—or who are out to get one another. How does this combination of fear and wonder affect our relationship with the natural world? And why has Carpenter personally been both drawn to, and repelled by, so many wild animals, including alligators, wolves, cougars, spiders, black bears, grizzlies, weasels, and of course, snakes, and particularly deadly rattlesnakes? The stories that fuel the essays in this entertaining memoir are as diverse as the animals—and insects!—at the heart of Carpenter’s inquiry. As a young man, Carpenter is working in Jasper National Park, and he’s lugging his banjo—hustling on his way to a paid gig—when he takes a short cut through the woods, makes a wrong turn and ends up at the dump. He looks across at some large animals. Horses? No, five, count ‘em, five grizzlies. Luckily a ranger on an actual horse leads him out of danger. He’s fishing for brook trout in the mountains with a friend, cooling their catch in a convenient snow bank. But the fish keep disappearing. He finds them cached under a nearby rock, and when he tries to pull one out, he’s in a tug-of-war with some hidden creature, small but fierce—is it a mink? Encounters like these drive the author into philosophical conjecture, into reading everything he can get his hands on about these and other creatures as he contemplates our place in the wild, and the value of the wild in our lives. These essays are essential reading for those of us who share David Carpenter’s fascination with the predators that so fundamentally shape our understanding of wilderness and the necessity to preserve it."

David Carpenter (Author), David Carpenter (Narrator)

Audiobook

Glorious: A Novel of the American West

"New York Times-bestselling author of The Last Gunfight, Jeff Guinn turns his eye for evocative detail and history to a sweeping novel of the Old West, weaving a compelling tale of life in the Arizona Territory in 1872. We’ve all got mistakes in our past we’d rather forget. Cash McLendon has always had an instinct for self-preservation, one that was honed by an impoverished childhood and life with an alcoholic father barely scraping by on the streets of Saint Louis in 1872. He’s always had a knack for finding and capitalizing on the slightest opportunities, choosing the path of financial security over happiness or real friends. He eventually builds himself up from a Saint Louis street urchin to the son-in-law and heir apparent to industrial mogul Rupert Douglass. Though it lacks passion, his life seems securely set: a wife, a career, property, standing. But when tragedy strikes, all of his plans and his entire future dissolve in an instant. McLendon’s instinct for survival kicks in; he flees Saint Louis, and Douglas assigns his enforcer, an ominous skull-cracker with steel-toed boots, to track him down. With nothing to lose, McLendon attempts to reconcile with an old flame—a woman he was nearly engaged to but put aside in exchange for the life now in shambles. He heard through the grapevine that she and her father moved their dry-goods store out west, to a speck-on-the-map mining town named Glorious, in the Arizona Territory. There, McLendon tries to win her back, and in the process discovers a new way of life at the edge of the final American frontier. But he can’t outrun his past forever. . . . "

Jeff Guinn (Author), David Carpenter (Narrator)

Audiobook

Ranchero

"Repo man Nick Reid will do anything to retrieve his landlady's stolen Ranchero in a wild race across the Mississippi Delta in this unforgettable series debut In Rick Gavin's rollicking series debut set squarely in the Mississippi Delta, Nick Reid has a simple job to do: repossess a flat screen TV from Percy Dwayne Dubois--pronounced 'Dew-boys,' front-loaded and hick specific. But Percy Dwayne wouldn't give in, no; he saw fit to go, the way his sort will, all white-trash philosophical and decided the world was stacked against him anyway. He hit Nick over the head with a fireplace shovel, tied him up with a length of lamp cord, and stole the mint-condition calypso coral-colored 1969 Ranchero that Nick had borrowed from his landlady. And he took the TV with him. Nick and his best friend Desmond, fellow repo man in Indianola, Mississippi, have no choice but to go after him. The fact that the trail eventually leads to Guy, a meth cooker recently set up in the Delta after the Feds ran him out of New Orleans, is of no consequence--Nick will do anything to get the Ranchero back. And it turns out he might have to. A unputdownable road-trip of a crime novel--most of it in Desmond's ex-wife's Geo--Ranchero is a fantastic series debut for fans of Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, and Carl Hiaasen."

Rick Gavin (Author), David Carpenter (Narrator)

Audiobook

Audiobooks Narrated by David Carpenter