Bug Out! Texas Part 1

Texas Lockdown

By: Robert Boren

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 6 hrs and 23 mins

Publisher's summary

Carrie is one tough mother.

It’s a normal day at the Dripping Springs Superstore. Shoppers look at merchandise while keeping their kids under control. Customers wait in the check-out lines, some chatting, others silently bored.

Everything is about to change.

Terrorists rush in with guns blazing, killing all who try to escape, rounding up the rest to hold hostage. Carrie, pregnant mother with a four-year-old at home, escapes into a stockroom closet. She calls her husband Jason, an Austin PD officer.

Jason and his partner find a raging massacre in the parking lot. They attack, badly outnumbered until Kelly and his rednecks fly onto the parking lot in their pickup trucks, shooting the terrorists where they stand.

Inside the store, Carrie’s hiding place is about to be discovered. She pulls the pistol from her purse and waits, firing when her closet is opened, killing the enemy fighters. As her husband frantically searches for her, Carrie slips into the storefront and attacks, foiling the terrorist’s plans. Reunited, Carrie and Jason think the danger is over.

They are wrong.

Terrorists attack them at home later that night, forcing them to flee into the darkness. Others join them as they try to find safety, the relentless enemy hounding them wherever they go.

Now there is only one thing left to do.

Fight back. Hunt the hunters.

If you love action-packed tales of bravery, self-reliance, and the triumph of the human spirit, you’ll love Bug Out! Texas. Get your copy today!

The worst narrative I’ve ever heard.

The computer generated voice is really bad. It doesn’t do abbreviations or decimals. Most of all it doesn’t have any emotions. Don’t know if I will listen to book 2 or not.

Poor reading

The virtual voice pauses are to long. It also doesn’t understand abbreviations, 50 cal does not mean 50 calories. It even used California once. Sometimes inflections are wrong. Overall I could listen to it but was irritating.

Good book, not great virtual narration.

Almost stopped listening because of the virtual narration.
Good plot and characters. Believe able story line.

Just Don’t

I listened to the Audible edition of this book. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend it. I believe the author to be a good human being worthy of conversation over coffee, but this book was not for me.

The author has an admirable command of language and does a beautiful job painting a word picture. He wrote characters you could see and seemed believable as real people. The author dropped the ball with subject matter research. The knowledge gaps were too large for me to suspend my disbelief and get into the story. I believe this author has great promise and would have been successful with more knowledge on the subject matter used in his story.

The main characters are law enforcement officers, and the story opens with an Active Killer scenario. Dispatch and the Incident Command System do not exist, despite every agency in the United States using both since the early 1970’s. All communications occur as if in a video game and use CB lingo rather than standard radio practices of the modern age. The linemen working for my local electrical cooperative are better with this than our main characters. These are seasoned LEOs with zero knowledge of Dispatch and industry standard communications.

These characters serve on the Austin Police Department, a major city agency, yet assignments and promotions have no structure. In this story all of these are subject to whim and not answerable to the needs of the city or the realities of whatever bureaucracy has developed there to keep the wheels turning. Any organization of more than two people has it. While I’ve never been to Austin, it defies possibility they alone of all human groupings lack this.

Military operations are conducted with no overwatch, communications, or coordination between units. Logistics happen by magic with no effort or planning and in conflict with the sentence which proceeded them. Any operation, even a meal for two or more people, requires planning and preparation but in this story large groups of people are fed, equipped, and re-equipped out of thin air. A few sentences with someone grumbling about preparations for something other planned event / operation being re-tasked to meet this emergency would have worked. Its absence made the story into a bad video game.

After each gun fight the bodies no longer exist. I do not mean they disappear or dissolve in LitRPG fashion; the character dies and then the author makes no mention of the body. There are military battles, and the winners walk away high fiving each other while the corpses are left to rot in the Texas sun of Main St. Yet no one sees or smells them. The holes in walls, corpses, etc. are all magically better without so much as a sentence. “Adam and Bill gathered the bodies in the central courtyard so the National Guard’s Mortuary Affairs Unit could more easily handle things,” would have helped. “Carl sealed the bullet holes with caulk before spackling the ones in the drywall,” would have worked, if not used too many times. "Daisy shivered from the draft coming through the walls left in the wall;" just something to address the issue created in the story.

I appreciate the story was not intended to be “Literature”, spoken with an upper crust British accent and curlicues. Some scenes from the opposition fighter’s viewpoint would have made them more than mere cardboard cutouts. The author let us see the Politician bad-guys, but not the bad-guys who did the fighting. Bad guys, while wrong, THINK they are “Good-Guys” and acknowledging their thinking both demonstrates why they are the enemy, makes them seem more human, and makes the story feel more real. Many things in this story suggest the author values characters who put their efforts where their values are; he missed a great opportunity to show this with the opposition fighters.

The narration was performed by computer. The programmers have brought the technology a long way. The narration has some of the correct voice inflection. It was much better than past attempts but has not yet reached a place where the computer doesn’t ruin the story. Some examples are the character fires a “50 cal.” which the computer narrator speaks as “Fifty calories.” The abbreviation R. V. is spoken “Ar-Vee” but the computer speaks it as “AR-vee.” Spaces which make sense visually on a page and are easily understood by a voice actor working as narrator, like the chapter number, become long awkward pauses with the computer narrator. This book would have been better with a voice actor; while the story issues would still exist, it might have brought the characters to life in a way which got me past them.