Echoes
Between my travels, I managed to find and upload a complete new tale of fiction for your enjoyment: Echoes by Nathan P. Butler
It begins with a murder in an Atlanta hotel room. There is no DNA. There are no fingerprints. There are only the victim’s ties to two powerful men: one a senator, the other a high-ranking aide to the President of the United States.
Amid an unfamiliar landscape of D.C. politics, Atlanta Homicide Detective Darren Fox must seek out a killer who leaves no trace, discover secrets long buried, and come face to face with one of America’s darkest secrets and most dangerous truths…
October 9th, 2006 at 4:14 pm
I just finished listening to to “Perceptions Shattered” and was blown away. What a fantastic twist for a detective pot-boiler. I never saw it coming. I am looking forward to the development of the Echo theme.
I highly recommend this podiobook.
Anthony Acker
December 5th, 2006 at 1:05 am
Very good book. Nice concept and well written.
I look forwrad to any further books in a subsequent series.
A big thanks to the author.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:41 pm
I enjoyed this story very much. I can’t wait for the next book in this series.
April 3rd, 2007 at 9:13 pm
Great story! I am looking forward to the next book.
August 6th, 2007 at 6:47 am
I loved this book. I also cannot wait till the next book in the series comes out and actually hope it comes out sooner then later.
August 6th, 2007 at 12:18 pm
This is one of the best books I have found on Podiobooks upto now! The only negative thing I have found is the speed of the narration, s-l-o-w d-o-w-n, please!!! As an actor I regularly see people who are really keen to take up acting thwarted by one thing, rapid speech. The same rules apply to narration as do acting, when rapid speech is required it is fine, but not throughout the whole reading, the inflection of the reader is really good, but staccato speech for whole chapters is very tiring on the ears! As I have said the book is one of the best I have yet found on Podiobooks, I am really looking forward to the next offering from this author, with slower reading please!
November 6th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
Thank you for the kind words about Echoes, everyone. I appreciate the support. I will definitely be taking the slower reading pace into account for future productions. I have so far shelved the Echoes sequel concept (Unity) and short story concept (Engagement) for the time being to focus on another story that I’m slowly working on (amid teaching every day, grad school, and the like). The new story, Greater Good, will hopefully be completed sometime before the end of 2008.
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:42 am
I had to give up half way through (rather annoying), due to the above mentioned “speed reading”. My impression so far, was that it was a engaging and thrilling story. But I kept loosing bits and pieces all the way due to the much to fast reading.
I hope you one day decide to reread this story, cos I’d like to get the end…
January 21st, 2008 at 8:36 am
I liked the concept of the story, but I felt like the end was rushed a bit. There was all this set up about the murder, but then when it actually came time to talk about the echoes I felt like it was rushed through and the ending was forced.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:48 am
I liked Echoes a lot. I thought that the characters could have used a little more developmental work, but other than that, the story was great. I love the concept of using ghosts…echoes if you prefer…as assassins. Looking forward to the sequel.
May 3rd, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Liked the book a lot. Yes, I noticed the speed-reading. My only complaint is one I saw touched on in one or two other comments – you spend over half the book on setup for the concept that is what makes the book special. I mean, the stuff before the echoes is well-written and fairly interesting, but the echoes are the spark of the book. It seems to me that to fix that, you would need to do two things – more foreshadowing in the first half and then lengthen the second half substantially (so it would become more than half the book).
I would certainly listen to the sequel.
June 15th, 2010 at 3:43 am
Hi Nathan,
I’m liking the story so far, but there’s one small technical thing that’s causing me problems. Your MP3s are very quiet, very very quiet so much so that I can barely hear them on the train with the volume maxed out.
I thought I’d fix it myself by normalising the files in Audacity and that’s where I spotted what I think is the problem.
In each of your files right at the beginning is a 20ms burst of static at full volume. The following audio is much quieter. When you try and normalise the file the process is fooled by the burst of very loud static which leaving the rest of the file really quiet.
If you delete the static then normalise it works great and you end up with much louder audio.
Sorry I’ve I’ve not explained myself very well… Go have a look, delete the static and re-normalise.
October 10th, 2010 at 3:39 am
As Matt Casey states, there is a short burst of static at the beginning of each file which renders the narration very quiet. Like Matt, I have also deleted this burst of static but instead of normalising in Audacity, I increased the gai by +18db which gives an audio level that is acceptable without any clipping.
To combat the narrators urge to finish the book in the shortest possible time, I also used Audacity’s ‘Change Speed’ effect to slow the audio down to an acceptable speed using -4%.
The result is in my opinion, 100% better than the original files.