Audiobooks by Robert R. Irvine

Pillar of Fire: A Moroni Traveler Novel Audiobook

Named after a Mormon saint, Moroni Traveler may be Salt Lake City’s only gentile private eye that still maintains uneasy contact with the Church of Latter-day Saints. This case finds the former pro football player reluctantly accepting a charge from one of the church leaders to investigate the enigmatic, self-effacing faith healer Jason Thurgood. Traveler’s commission takes him downwind of the old atomic testing sites to the desolate southwest corner of Utah, commonly known as cult country because of the long-standing activity of various polygamists and self-proclaimed prophets there. Currently the area is under the sway of Moroni’s Children, a cult headed by the ruthless, power-hungry Orrin Porter. At the same time, Moroni’s father and partner, Martin, is working on a missing persons case involving the young mentally handicapped son of an old friend just across the border in Nevada. Oddly, the two cases begin to converge, and the Travelers realize that the superficial answers they seek mask darker, more complex forces at work. “Irvine expertly mines his setting for the narrative riches of myth, superstition, and religious history. His Traveler stories consistently offer thoughtful entertainment. No exception here.”—Publishers Weekly

Robert R. Irvine (Author), Jeffrey Kafer (Narrator)

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The Hosanna Shout: A Moroni Traveler Novel

Moroni Traveler, the Salt Lake City investigator heralded by the New York Times Book Review as “a true rebel hero in the classic private-eye tradition,” finds himself working on a very personal case as he and his adoptive father, Martin, look for the three-year-old child who may or may not be Moroni’s son. Tracking down a lead, the two men end up in a virtual ghost town in the Oquirrh Mountains. All but deserted, the old mining town of Bingham Canyon is about to be evacuated and razed by the powerful Kennecott Copper Company, which is eager to get at the mineral wealth buried beneath the community. A few families are hanging on, though, including one that may be sheltering the newest Traveler. The father-son duo’s efforts are hampered by the slated demolition of their offices in the Chester Building, and even more so by the antics of their fellow tenants, Mad Bill and Charlie Redwine, whose latest shenanigans have evoked the wrath of the church. With Martin trying to preserve the building and protect Bill and Charlie, Moroni continues the search—until murder rears its ugly head and the investigation moves into a whole new dimension. “What matters here is not the curlicues of plot but character, history, and atmosphere, all neatly realized.”—Publishers Weekly

Robert R. Irvine (Author), Jeffrey Kafer (Narrator)

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The Great Reminder: A Moroni Traveler Novel

Major Lewis Stiles is dying of cancer, but he wants all his affairs in order before he is “called home.” To that end he wants to hire Moroni Traveler and his father, Martin, to track down one of the prisoners he was responsible for during World War II. Unseen since his mysterious disappearance from the POW camp at Cowdery Junction, Utah, Karl Falke is still owed $132.07 in back pay, and Stiles wants Falke to receive his due. Knowing the chances of success are slim to none, Moroni is reluctant, but ever a soft touch for lost causes he takes the case. The search seems innocent enough, but as with any investigation in the promised land, the Travelers soon run up against the Latter-day Saints. Moroni’s childhood friend Willis Tanner, now a high-level bureaucrat in the church, continues to poke his nose into Traveler business, this time with the added incentive of keeping the prophet’s niece Lael Woolley out of trouble. While grappling with issues of family and responsibility, Moroni realizes that the answers to riddles from the past are to be found in the small towns and silent graveyards of Utah. “Irvine expertly unravels a skein of decades-old mysteries in a satisfying addition to his unusual, solid series.”—Publishers Weekly

Robert R. Irvine (Author), Jeffrey Kafer (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Spoken Word: A Moroni Traveler Novel

“How many times have I told you? Never get involved with the church hierarchy.” Words of wisdom, surely, but Moroni Traveler can’t seem to take his father’s advice. Salt Lake City private investigators, Moroni and his father, Martin, maintain an uneasy truce with the Church of Latter-day Saints. But Moroni owes a debt to his boyhood friend Willis Tanner, now one of the top-ranking officials in the LDS, and Willis has come to collect. Lael Woolley, grandniece of the First Prophet, the head of the Mormon church on earth, has been kidnapped, and the prophet believes only Traveler, a gentile, can rescue her. Moroni agrees, although reluctantly—in Salt Lake City you just don’t say no to the LDS. He and his father set out to find Lael with carte blanche from the prophet and the assistance of three enterprising, offbeat drifters who live in the lobby of the Travelers’ office building. Their search takes them around the state and into the church’s extensive genealogical records, pointing to a subversive Mormon feminist group that may or may not be responsible for Lael’s disappearance. “Splendid…Battling springtime torrents, high-heeled harpies who kick him where it hurts the most, interfering churchmen, and a host of convinced traditionalists, Moroni uncovers a surprising, devilish plan. The identity of the Evil One is clear early on, but that doesn’t diminish the suspense in this rewarding novel.”—Publishers Weekly

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Jeffrey Kafer (Narrator)

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Thread of the Spider

“That car…belonged to a pair of bank robbers. Their names were Knute and Nora and they were almost as famous as Bonnie and Clyde during the Depression…They got killed in the Green River Massacre, but the car was never found.” “There’s more,” Nick said. “This paper is dated more than a year before the Japanese attacked Pearl…And there’s a handwritten notation at the bottom: ‘If need be, we must allow the Japanese to strike the first blow in order to unite the American people for the coming war,’…initialed ‘FDR.’” Nicolette Scott and her father are both archaeologists—but with differences. Professor Elliot Scott lives and breathes very early Americans, like the Anasazi. His digs are in the southwest, where the ancient peoples lived. To him, his daughter Nicky’s area of concern is not to be taken seriously. Nicky goes for the culture embodied by artifacts from the twentieth century—a crashed plane from either world war is enough to send her senses tingling. So when she discovers a 1937 Packard convertible hidden in a sealed cave in the Utah desert, she is ecstatic. It’s only when she begins to read through the papers hidden under a seat cushion that the thrill turns to something very like a chill. If those papers are genuine, they represent a huge find for Nick. But they also represent one of the most scandalous secrets in our country’s history. Authentic or fake, they are still important to someone, as Nick learns when invisible threats start closing in, culminating in a murderous meeting under the blazing Utah sun. This is Nicolette’s most suspenseful dig, and one that will keep readers gasping and pages turning.

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Angela Brazil (Narrator)

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Barking Dogs

The network news crew flying out from Los Angeles to cover a forest fire in Idaho believe themselves entitled to danger pay. The blaze has completely destroyed a rural religious community and all its inhabitants and is still raging—but that’s not the reason they feel at risk. The danger comes from their on-screen reporter—beautiful, sexy, and malignantly ambitious Vicki Garcia. When Vicki turns her wiles on a man who has something she wants—whether an extra minute on camera or a helicopter ride to the off-limits scene of the tragedy—she gets it. Sometimes it provides great coverage; but it can also get one or more of her victims incarcerated, incapacitated, or incinerated. Particularly at peril is the crew’s smitten field producer, Kevin Manwaring, whom Vicki keeps on edge with unspoken—and unfulfilled—promises of delights to come. The small Idaho town, formerly occupied by the gentle people who perished in the conflagration, is coveted by a mining company. The story seems simple enough—until the television technicians discover a severely wounded dog with a bullet in its chest. As the crew investigates the true origin of the fire, they become the prey of a clever killer. “Compelling…Kevin Manwaring is an attractive character with a promising future.”—Kirkus Reviews

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Charlie Thurston (Narrator)

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Ratings Are Murder

Bob Christopher, investigative reporter for Channel 3 in Los Angeles, is an old hand at ferreting out consumer fraud. He hardly feels that an all-out effort to reinstate Saint Christopher to the church’s calendar fits that category. Then the cleaning woman who had taken up the saint’s cause is brutally murdered. Bob, guilty because he brushed the old woman off, is compelled to search for her killer. He finds himself dodging cloudbursts, raccoons, spilled blood, and his obsessed boss, who needs Bob’s presence on the six o’clock news to improve the ratings. Adding to his problems is his elusive film editor, an entrepreneur usually too busy peddling stolen porno tapes to work on the program. Through this hectic action wander rain-soaked fans in weird costumes vying for places and prizes on the station’s game show. They make it easy for suspects—disguised as surgeons, nuns, and chickens—to melt into the crowd. As Bob Christopher approaches dead center of the web of murder, blackmail, chicanery, X-rated films, and station politics that infest Channel 3’s rickety building, he gets closer to a killer who is out to make the reporter his next victim. “Christopher is worth bringing back.”—Kirkus Reviews

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Richard Waterhouse (Narrator)

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Called Home: A Moroni Traveler Novel

The isolated town of Wasatch sits in Mormon country—a hard place where right and wrong are as clear as night and day. But smoke from nearby mountain wildfires swirls menacingly through the streets, as unsettling as the dark secrets so zealously guarded by Brigham Young’s faithful. Moroni Traveler, a PI named for an angel, is an outsider—an unwanted unbeliever determined to discover the truth about a dead woman. Branded a devil and greeted with violence, Moroni launches into an investigation that leads him into a smoldering thicket of rumor and concealment. Two people have already been killed. When the case turns brutally personal, there’s no going back, and Moroni will journey through hell to ensure that vengeance will be his. “Exciting and intriguing.”—Publishers Weekly

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Jeffrey Kafer (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Return of the Spanish Lady

Nicolette Scott is an archaeologist whose knowledge of early airplanes has won her kudos as an expert, a reputation for ignoring authority, and a job at the Smithsonian. Shortly after she begins working there, she is thrilled to be included in the museum’s latest project. E-Group, a large pharmaceutical company, is equipping an expedition to a remote region of Alaska, where a Japanese “Val” bomber plane was shot down during World War II. It’s a gamble, but the money is being provided, and if the small group of experts can locate the plane and somehow bring it back to Washington, it will be a coup—and a boost for Nicolette’s career. Not long after the search begins, Nicolette is shocked to discover that there is a darker reason for E-Group’s generous sponsorship. The expedition’s real goal reaches all the way back to the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–1919, grimly nicknamed “the Spanish Lady,” which killed millions around the world. The virus of this flu still exists in those few victims who are preserved in frozen ground—and once the pharmaceutical company learns that three World War I veterans searching Alaska for gold had died of the disease near the Val, they will do everything in their power to get their hands on the bodies. Unless Nicolette risks her own life to defuse E-Group’s nefarious plan, the lives of hundreds of millions will be at stake. “Chapters describing the 1918 epidemic interspersed with the main story provide some historical perspective. Readers will keep turning pages to follow this engaging mixture of science, history, and action.”—Booklist

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Angela Brazil (Narrator)

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Footsteps

A tranquil resort in the sunbaked sands of southern Utah; a pioneer archaeologist haunted by a bizarre ESP experience, whose footsteps would deliver him to the brink of everlasting evil; a strange old woman who lives in a local hotel, spinning tales of dread and retribution; a tower of blood-red rock called Satan’s Seat, looming over the town like a monolithic gravestone … The stage is set as an unearthly artifact is exhumed from the depths of hell, an unspeakable force that would exact the most heinous and grisly revenge—a godforsaken horror that should have been left to rest in peace. “A writer who is alternately warm and cynical, but always knowing.”—Publishers Weekly, praise for the author

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Barry Press (Narrator)

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Horizontal Hold

Bombs, death, and a deadly terrorist have television reporter Bob Christopher at odds with an evil conspiracy. The star anchorman of Los Angeles Channel 3 News had appeared on his last show—as the victim of a terrorist bomb. The shock waves were still rumbling when his accused killer was found dead of an apparent suicide. The terrorist’s death should have closed the case. But instead, it opens a nightmarish can of worms when television newsman Bob Christopher can’t let bad enough alone and defies the men with money and muscle to focus in on a macabre conspiracy of evil that feeds on human lives and manacles the law. "He's got the touch."—Wallace Stegner, praise for the author

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Richard Waterhouse (Narrator)

Audiobook

Wake of the Hornet

Fifteen miles long, bordered by pristine white beaches, Balesin is an emerald paradise in the blue waters of the South Pacific and home to a bizarre religious cult. Since World War II, the people of Balesin have worshiped airplanes and the rich cargo they carry. Hoping to obtain the spoils of the modern world, they have spent decades trying to lure aircraft down out of the sky with a homemade airstrip and mock planes. But for those who know it, Balesin has an even darker side—one shrouded in a legend of death and cannibalism. For Nicolette Scott, an expedition to Balesin brings together her life’s twin passions: archaeology and airplanes. But soon two members of the expedition are dead, and from thousands of miles away, a powerful noose of intrigue is tightening around natives and visitors alike. Now Nicolette’s life is in danger too, as her research brings her closer to uncovering this strange island’s long-held mysteries, secrets from the past that have the power to kill. “Move over Patricia Cornwell, [R. R. Irvine] is here!”—Lia Matera, author of Havana Twist, praise for the author

R. R. Irvine, Robert R. Irvine (Author), Angela Brazil (Narrator)

Audiobook