Rish Performs "The Case of the Vanishing Boy" on Audible

Rish here.  I warned you I'd be doing these posts a lot in the future.  I also warned you not to go out tonight.

So, one of the two first jobs I got doing audiobooks has now shown up on Audible.com.  This is "The Case of the Vanishing Boy" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.  This is the first story in a series of "Spade/Paladin Conundrum" mysteries that the author has published, and when I first signed on, I was excited at the prospect of being the voice for all of them.

First off, Ms. Rusch is an author I've actually heard of, which probably translates to other people having heard of her and consider themselves fans, which probably further translates to more folks wanting to buy her work than your average self-published writer.  That could be lucrative, as well as fun.

The story is centered around a Science Fiction/Fantasy convention, and the main character, Spade, is the man you'd want to hire to make sure everything goes well.  He's a huge guy with a clever mind, and watches over a convention every weekend to troubleshoot, and occasionally, to solve mysteries.  He meets Paladin, an attractive young woman who also frequents conventions, tracking down stolen merchandise, missing equipment, and in this case, missing persons.

They team up to solve the mystery, and lots of geek-centric fun is to be had. 

Now that I've done a lot of these things, I really appreciate the quality of writing in the story, and the fact that, of the two KKR stories I have produced, there was not a single typo, grammatical error, or nonsense sentence to be found.

Plus, she's a really clever writer, with a very amusing voice.  Rusch is a pretty big name in SF circles (and her husband, Dean Wesley Smith, briefly instructed Big Anklevich in the ways of the Force and that gun kata stuff that was a thing for a while), and her writing sounds really genuine, as though she knows exactly what fan conventions are like, and the kind of people who go to them.  Of course, she also wrote a Sci-Fi murder mystery that felt just as genuine, and I'm fairly sure she's never lived on a space station.

Unfortunately, since it was the first project I started on, and the learning curve has been so sharp, I'm not sure how great-sounding my reading is.  Surely not crappy enough to cause me not to recommend it, but like the very first episode of the Dunesteef we did, I'm haunted by the fact that the sound quality and editing is at a level way below what we'd do nowadays.*

I had a great deal of trouble with this production, and those headaches did pretty much all they could to break my will.  But I'm still doing audiobooks in April 2013, so I guess I got back up again.

Anyhow, the story can be found here:
Case of the Vanishing Boy on Audible.  It's for sale, along with a big chunk of her fiction and non-fiction, and yeah, I get a little portion of every copy it sells.**

I don't know if I am still in the running to record the rest of the stories in this series (my gut tells me I'm not), but if you can't get enough of mysteries among geek culture (especially those read by me), pick it up and tell me what you think.  Who knows, I may be the only one who sees the defects in the file.  And that would be nice.

Rish Outfield, Audiobook Nerd

*To the point that I often ask Big if we can re-do that story someday, knowing what we know now.

**Not that that is why I'm hyping it.  I'll be happy to plug the stories I don't get a percentage of, and I've hesitated to plug a couple that I would be paid for.