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    Skinner
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    Skinner
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    Skinner
    Audiobook13 hours

    Skinner

    Written by Charlie Huston

    Narrated by Jay Snyder

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Known by the name of the psychological experiment that fostered his emotionless brutality, Skinner founded his career in "asset protection" on fear. To touch anyone under Skinner's protection was to invite destruction. A savagely effective methodology, until Skinner's CIA handlers began to fear him as much as his enemies did and banished him to the hinterlands of the intelligence community.

    Now, a cyber-terrorist attack on the US power grid is about to end that long exile. His asset is Jae, a roboticist with a gift for seeing the underlying systems violently shaping a new era of global guerrilla warfare.

    At the root of is all is a young boy, the innocent seed of a plot grown in the slums of Mumbai. Brought to flower, that plot will tip the balance of world power in a perilous new direction.

    A combination of Le Carre spycraft with Stephenson techno-philosophy from the novelist hailed by the Washington Post as "the voice of twenty-first century crime fiction," SKINNER is Charlie Huston's masterpiece - a new kind of thriller for a new kind of world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateJul 9, 2013
    ISBN9781619696983
    Unavailable
    Skinner

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    Reviews for Skinner

    3.5/5

    37 ratings3 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Charlie Huston has a wonderful way of taking the familiar and adding something you weren't expecting. His vampire crime noir series as well as his last novel "Sleepless" are great examples of this. In the former Huston takes the dime novel detective genre and drops in dead into vampire mythology. And in the latter he gives us a police thriller set in a world that no longer sleeps. And his latest novel "Skinner" continues this trend by taking the stock spy thriller and adding to it a boy kept in a Skinner Box until he was 12, and then let him loose on the world. Huston keeps you guessing all the way to the end, and along the way touches on topics you weren't expecting. A great book by a great writer.
    • 3/5
      An autistic (handsome too!) hitman, and his "asset", a robot building, kung fu fighting uh, kung fu fighting robot builder, are on the lam from a private security company. No, several private security companies. And terrorists. And the C.I.A. For God knows what reason. Confusing, but well written and entertaining. It suffers a little from the thriller movie problem in which the previously thought to be invincible protagonist is captured then escapes due to the overconfidence and carelessness of his captor. Who (duh) should have put a bullet in him when he had a chance. It does have a lot to say about the notion of privacy and government secrecy and surveillance. Great plot twist at the end.
    • 4/5
      Charlie Huston is one of my (many) favorite authors. He has a lean mean writing style that mostly gets out of the way of the story he wants to tell. His stories do a great job of twining several layers of plot in ways that are entertaining.I'd say he hit the mark again here. I really enjoyed his primary idea, about how Skinner was raised and the extraordinary nuance Huston puts into so few flashback-y words. "Skinner's Maxim" is pure gold. The master coordinator and talent scout, Terrence, plays such a huge role for a character that gets so little screen time. And Jae was another fully fleshed out bizarre-talent person. Wonderful!And then he weaves in a secondary plot, really more a theme, about "contraction" (not really a spoiler without any context). The secondary plot was more about military contractors.Huston has a masterful touch with his minor supporting characters. Maker Smith, for example. I so appreciate how smoothly Huston sketches these sort of oddballs, using relatively few words.I started to enjoy Skinner's foil, Haven, but I felt the plot was robbed. There had to be more scenes between those two. Perhaps they fell to the editing knife (X-Acto #28, lol)? And the final resolution between them, without spoiling it, was a lame joke compared to what I anticipated. It was fully intentional and I suspect it was Huston 'taking the piss' on us. Doesn't matter much as it was only a blemish on a solid 4-star canvas.I've got one harsh complaint and that is the dialog. Huston's style is naturally sparse but too many characters' speech patterns were telegraphic. I can show what I mean by the following exchange between two characters (not an actual quote but darn close in some places) -- "Hello." "Did you?" "You know." "Of course." "So there we are."It makes perfect sense for some characters, like Jae and Skinner, but it got annoying when it is everyone. It is too skeletal, too much of an affectation. This felt like some laziness on Huston's part, or where his ego and track record beat down some editor's suggestions. I imagine Huston editing his dialog and trying to drop out as many words as he can without losing us entirely. There were times it felt like that.There were places where the pacing was off. Very unusual for Huston. And it took some extra effort to get into the story, introducing the characters and how they relate to each other.One last pet peeve. And I think Huston knows better than this one also. He interchangeably uses the words "magazine" and "clip" for the magazine of a pistol or rifle. Magazine is the one and only correct term. "Clip" belongs to the holding-a-gun-sideways and watching too many action movies aesthetic. I got the feeling Charlie made an intentional dig at pedantics like me because he uses "magazine" once or twice and then it goes all clippy.This story is also dated strongly by some of the pop culture and world event references. It plays very well today but it might weaken this book for readers twenty years from now. Very minor nitpick.I think if Huston repaired the dialog, didn't screw us with Haven's end, and fixed some pacing issues I might rate this as five stars. It is very good, to me, and if you like Huston's other works you'll probably like this one as well. But it doesn't have the "small" feel of his usual noir. This one rambles around the world. Maybe I also like his rants.