The Dawn Patrol - Don Winslow

Written by Don Winslow
Read by Ray Porter
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Release date: June 3, 2008
Duration: 09:38:26

Ex-cop turned PI Boone Daniels lives to surf. Every morning he’s out with the Dawn Patrol: four men and one woman as single-minded about surfing as he is. Or nearly: they have “real jobs”. Boone works as a PI just enough to keep himself in fish tacos—and in the water whenever the waves are “epic macking crunchy”.

But Boone is also obsessed with the unsolved case of a young girl named Rain who was abducted while he was with the San Diego police. He blames himself, just as almost everyone in the department did, for not being able to save her.

Unexpectedly, Boone finds himself with the chance to make amends. It might mean missing the most colossal waves he’s liable ever to encounter, not to mention putting the Dawn Patrol in serious harm’s way, but the new investigation gives him a wilder ride than any he’s ever imagined.

Dan Silver, owner of Silver Dan’s strip club, may have burned down his own warehouse to collect on the insurance money. When the insurance company hires beautiful lady lawyer Petra Hall to sue Silver, she turns to Boone to do the detective work. If all this sounds mildly comic, it is, but it’s also dark, violent and plenty serious as Winslow keeps raising the stakes, as well as the waves, for all involved.

Don Winslow’s surfing thriller weaves a compelling murder mystery like a boarder cutting in and out of a massive corkscrew wave. Narrator Ray Porter opts for a subtle, underplayed performance, delivering effective plot twists without giving them away and, thankfully, avoiding any of the stereotypical portrayals that abound in dozens of other surfer stories. There are no “dude’s” or “totally radical’s” to be heard here (a style of slang that protagonist Boone Daniels casually refers to as “surfbonics”). Ultimately, Porter displays a knack for creating tension with little more than an underlying, and seemingly undetectable, shift in tone that resonates somewhere deep in the imagination of the listener. A true thriller! L.B. (c) AudioFile 2008,