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Edge of Battle  By  cover art

Edge of Battle

By: Dale Brown
Narrated by: Michael McShane
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Editorial reviews

The combination of illegal immigration and advanced military weapons research promises an edge-of-the-seat thriller. The story begins as illegal immigrants are killed near Operation Rampart, a test military base with a crew of Talon robots in Southern California. Michael McShane effectively manipulates pitch and tone, creates a variety of male and female characters, and delivers American and Mexican accents.

Publisher's summary

Violence and tensions along the US-Mexican border have never been higher, sparked by battles between rival drug lords and an increased flow of illegal migrants. To combat the threat, the United States has executed Operation Rampart: a controversial test base in southern California run by Major Jason Richter and TALON, his high-tech special operations unit.

Their success is threatened by a drug kingpin and migrant smuggler named Ernesto Fuerza. In the guise of Mexican nationalist "Commander Veracruz", he causes a storm of controversy on both sides of the border, calling for a revolution to take back the northernmost "Mexican states", the Southwest United States. His real intention is to make it easier to import illegal drugs across the border. Soon Richter and his force are reassigned to the FBI to take on a deadly mission that will bring him face-to-face with Fuerza and set off a wave of bloodshed that threatens to become an all-out guerrilla war. Lurking behind Fuerza is Richter's nemesis, former Soviet nuclear forces commander turned terror mastermind Yegor Zakharov, who is set on revenge to the very end.

In Edge of Battle, best-selling author Dale Brown stays a step ahead of world events. Don't miss this sensational ride!

©2006 Dale Brown (P)2006 HarperCollinsPublishers

Critic reviews

"Brown puts us into the cockpit....Authentic and gripping." (The New York Times)
"Action junkies...will zip through this near-future techno-thriller." (Publishers Weekly)

What listeners say about Edge of Battle

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  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Disappointing

Brown gets too bogged down in the politics. If I wanted to listen to such quibbling, I'd put on CSPAN. Military technology and general ass kickery sell themselves. Why he feels the need to also apologize for it is beyond me. The narrator was nasal and generally poor. It was hard to follow who was speaking in the story. 30 bucks can be much better spent. I'm done with Brown.

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Meetings

I gave up after a while, The story has potential but got fed up with the meetings and press conferences.
I felt like I was watching CNN same stuff replaying over and over.

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4 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars

Narrator not to my liking

I just didn't like the narrator's voice for this book. I tried listening to it for about an hour, thinking/hoping I would get used to it, but it didn't happen. I ended up deleting it and listening to something else. I can't say the story isn't good, I just didn't like the narrator.

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3 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

Some performances are just too painful to listen

What would have made Edge of Battle better?

A different reader with better voices

What was most disappointing about Dale Brown’s story?

It just dragged on and combined with the performance of the narrator I felt like driving my car into a tree.

Would you be willing to try another one of Michael McShane’s performances?

Not while I can hear.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Edge of Battle?

I can't say as I did not finish the book.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    4 out of 5 stars

hard to listen to

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

The performance was horrible. I could not hear half of it and the other half was so garbled with the attempted accents that I could not understand it.

How could the performance have been better?

More consistent volume and stop trying to mimic accents.

Did Edge of Battle inspire you to do anything?

erase it from my mp3 player

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Political Diatribe

A subject that is worthy of serious debate, not overly contrived characters who spend pages and pages (or so it seemed) spewing extremist points of view.
Very disappointing. I have enjoyed Dale Brown books in the past, not complex reads, but fun.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Confused

I didn't make it all the way though because Dale Brown was so confused he just couldn't seem to come to grips with the story. Every character was confused. I think it could have worked if some characters held one view and others the opposing view but every characters held every view. His alternate reality based on his past books also slows the story down.

He needs to leave the baggage of his past books behind and move on to a new reality. His characters also seemed to forget the story they are in, people with automatic weapons are not guest workers. I really liked his first books but his new stuff is really just bad.

The narrator was good but his sexy woman voice didn't make it. I thought he was trying to make her a cigarette smoking women off the “Golden Girls” not a hot looking women.

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2 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
  • Performance
    3 out of 5 stars
  • Story
    1 out of 5 stars

the only brown book ive disliked

I've listened to all of Dale Brown's books available on audible. I've liked all of them with this as the sole exception. It's as if the book were written by somebody else. It was very borimg & a waste of time.

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Could this ever happen?

With oil prices, labor shortages and everything else going on right now, could this ever happen? Immigration laws need reforming to address Dale's story, but why are we Americans so lazy to let something like Dale write about ever come to pass?

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1 person found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars

Give me my money back PLEASE

More of a discussion of illegal immigration than fictional story. I only made it 4 hours before pulling the plug.

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1 person found this helpful