First, a warning: this book features much sadness and violence inflicted on an alien dog. This almost made me stop listening multiple times. If you’re very sensitive to such things, you may want to avoid this.
Now: others have compared these stories to Firefly, and very rightly so. I would add that they’re also akin to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories, or any such picaresque tales of swashbuckling adventure. This is something that’s not uncommon in amateur fiction but sadly lacking in professional fiction, these days, and it’s wonderful to have here.
The setting is sci fi, but with magic – treated as the ability to enforce one’s will upon the universe, which is not an incompatible idea with science or science fiction. Though there is some additional weirdness beyond the existence of magic, which I shant spoil. If you like the idea of sci fi + wizards, I expect you’ll like the other bits of oddness, and if you don’t, you won’t like these stories.
The characters are all very interesting and likeable. Their development is engaging. The mix of plot, sidetracking, downtime, and backstory exploration all conspire to make me strongly suspect that these stories come from the author’s tabletop roleplaying game adventures. They feel very much like an RPG campaign. In a very good way.
The reader is perhaps the best part. He is excellent. His range is fantastically broad. He does female characters well – not trying to do a spot on female voice and failing, but to just communicate that it is a female character. His aliens are wonderful, and you can hear the simianity and felininity of the monkey-based and cat-based characters, as well as giant heaps of personality. Everyone sounds different, and his narrator voice. It is the best performance I’ve yet heard. By a lot.
And the value is amazing. It’s 85 hours of quality. You will still want more.