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Starter Villain

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Starter Villain

By: John Scalzi
Narrated by: Wil Wheaton
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Inheriting your uncle's supervillain business is more complicated than you might think. Particularly when you discover who's running the place.

Charlie's life is going nowhere fast. A divorced substitute teacher living with his cat in a house his siblings want to sell, all he wants is to open a pub downtown, if only the bank will approve his loan.

Then his long-lost uncle Jake dies and leaves his supervillain business (complete with island volcano lair) to Charlie.

But becoming a supervillain isn't all giant laser death rays and lava pits. Jake had enemies, and now they're coming after Charlie. His uncle might have been a stand-up, old-fashioned kind of villain, but these are the real thing: rich, soulless predators backed by multinational corporations and venture capital.

It's up to Charlie to win the war his uncle started against a league of supervillains. But with unionized dolphins, hyperintelligent talking spy cats, and a terrifying henchperson at his side, going bad is starting to look pretty good.

In a dog-eat-dog world...be a cat.

©2023 John Scalzi (P)2023 Audible, Inc. Adventure Fantasy Science Fiction Superhero Funny Witty Feel-Good
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Fantastic book! If you're looking for a fun book with excellent narration performance this is for you!

Entertaining, quirky and very fun

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In short, I loved it.
In long, I found it intriguing and uber quirky, the latter a less traditional approach for John Scalzi. The story’s fun and cleverly unusual plot is totally understandable to me since I learned of Mr Scalzi’s writing experience whilst suffering with long COVID and how that fries your grey (and white) matter for a long period before recovery giving rise to even more creative ideas. Wil Wheaton, what else can I say? He is a mainstay for my listening. Hats off to you Mr Wheaton, another en point performance.

Funny, quirky and clever, also intriguing and not just so for the cat lovers among us.

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This book is silly, in a really enjoyable way. I has a lot of fun listening and was invested in the story and the characters.

Silly and fun to listen to

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This book feels like the introduction to a much larger story, but is still good in its own rights.

Great listen, interesting premise

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Highly amusing story about Charlie whose life is going nowhere and then his rich uncle dies and he has to represent him at the funeral. Things start going wrong from there starting with someone trying to rob the corpse to his house blowing up. He has to try and negotiate with striking dolphins and end up not dead.
Wil Wheaton is a good narrator but pretty much has one voice.
An enjoyable listen.

Cats, dolphins, volcano island lair and plots within plots.

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