The Easytown Novels: Books 1-3

By: Brian Parker

Narrated by: Daniel Penz

Length: 28 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

The Easytown Novels create a frighteningly real near future world beset by climate change, social depravity, moral ambiguity, and corporate greed. Easytown is city with a thousand stories and the hard-nosed homicide detective, Zach Forrest, is determined to learn them all.

Book 1 - The Immorality Clause: Easytown’s robotic pleasure clubs are a serial killer’s playground.

The futuristic slum in eastern New Orleans is a violent place where any vice can be satisfied - for a price. As long as the taxes are paid and tourists continue to flock to the city, businesses are allowed to operate as they see fit. When a string of grisly murders rocks the city, homicide detective Zach Forrest must hunt down the killer responsible before they strike again.

Book 2 - Tears of a Clone: Torture tourism is an illegal sport in Easytown - unless the victim is a clone, then nobody cares.

When Detective Forrest discovers the mutilated bodies of three clones in a garbage compactor, he’s shocked to learn of the multi-million dollar industry of torture tourism. He embarks on an unauthorized investigation and discovers that the truth behind the clone murders is more terrifying than he’d imagined.

Book 3 - West End Droids & East End Dames: Everything comes crashing down on Forrest when a rampaging cyborg attacks, disrupting his investigation into the death of a lowly thumper club doorman who knew too much. Before he can determine his next move, a beautiful evidence clerk lands on his doorstep and forces her way into his life. Meanwhile, the precinct chief tasks him to track down and stop the street doctors who build the abominations.

But, will doing so cost Zach more than he’d expected?

©2019 Brian Parker (P)2019 Brian Parker

Slow to start and hard to stop listening! Love it!

Really good sci fi read. Perfect for men. Hope there is another book in this series soon.

A strange soap opera of an adventure

This is just fun! The plots twist just enough to maintain interest. The characters evolve just enough to be loveable. Some of the bad guys are really evil, some not so much.

Recommended to all fans of Stargate or Serenity... this adventure takes place on Earth, but it’s fun, romp around, shoot em up work of the future (with robots not aliens!)

I received this audiobook for free in exchange for a review.

Great box set

I was getting burned out on my regular reads and picked this box set up. Wow! I loved the narrator and all the different characters voices with the help of some voice modulators too. It was very engaging and fun to listen to. Great main characters and I already picked up the next book in the series.
I agree with other reviews, I hope there's more to come 🙏

Easytown

I absolutely loved this series! I love the old time film noir detectives ala Sam Spade and the protagonist in this book, Zachary Forrest, reminds me of those fedora-wearing guys. I also love the original movie, "Blade Runner", and this series reminded me of that movie many, many times.

Futuristic New Orleans has a section called Easytown (probably today's French Quarter) which specializes in sex clubs populated with sex robots. When several patrons and employees are murdered in gruesome ways, Zach has to try to find out who is doing the killing. Along the way, he becomes involved with a beautiful witness named Paxton Amora. This relationship comes to haunt Zach in more ways than one!

This series has cyborgs, drones, droids, artificial intelligence, as well as drugs, prostitution, and murder. Zach goes about his job in a no-holds barred way, endangering love, life and limb, in order to get his man (or woman).

If you are looking for a well-written cyberpunk series with traces of noir detective novels, this is the one you need to read or listen to. At the end of the third book, Zach has pretty much used up all of his favors within the NOPD, but the author hints at more adventures to come in the next phase of Zach's life.

I love the characters, including Zach's assistant, Andi, who is little like Alexa (but much more fun). The dialogue is great and I especially enjoyed Zach and Andi's interactions. Zach has a smart-assed attitude that won't quit and adds a lot to the book. I loved the idea of the talking toilet that gives you an automatic urine analysis every time you use it.

The narration was wonderful. Mr. Penz didn't just read this book, he portrayed every scene and you feel like you are watching a movie while listening. When the character is in pain, you can feel it in the narration. His performance added a lot to my enjoyment of these books.

Brian Parker has done an excellent job with this series and I look forward to reading more of his work. He has built a world full of well-developed characters and futuristic technology that will keep the biggest cyperpunk fan reading. I will definitely recommend his writing to my friends!

I was given the chance to listen to the audiobook version of this series through Audiobook Boom! and chose to review it.

Give this one a try!

First of all, I bought this series, and did not receive it to review. I wanted something "cyberpunk" and gritty, and this one really got me. There are 3 separate stories, each one stands in it's own right. I got really involved with all the main characters, and the setting is great. If you like cyberpunk or noir, I urge you to give this one a chance!

Interesting Story

Very well written. I loved the dystopian not so distant future. I was able to picture this guru really easily due to the descriptive writing. I felt very much like I was listening to an audio drama.

hope there is more to come

I loved this. he went from droids to cyber. clones were in between. his hope and love of humanity is lovely

Pour a bourbon and grab this series

It ain’t easy to live in the Big Easy, and according to Brian Parker, it ain’t getting any easier in the future. Parker has created a delightfully tangible world. This is one of the few neo-noir cyberpunks that feels just as real as everyday life. The tech is futuristic, but it’s neither terrifyingly and malignantly powerful nor is it humanity’s salvation. It still fritzes and glitches. AI has gotten just smart enough to talk to us, but not smart enough to realize that saying ‘he’s unavailable due to being in jail on suspicion of murder’ is really unhelpful. Your toilet can analyze your urine and hearing its health advice every morning is mandated by the city and the insurance companies, but people ignore it all the same. The cars are all self-driving, but the insurance company still keeps beaters on hand to fob off on high-risk cops who managed to sink their last model in a fricking lake (!!!) People are still people. New tech lets them be people in new and interesting ways. But their human needs and misdeeds haven’t changed. That touch of tawdry grit made this world wonderfully rough around the edges and as endearing as your favorite, worn-out sweatshirt.
A classic whodunnit-romp in the noir mold, the series’ plots move in all the ways you expect. The tired charm of noir has been updated with pleasure-bots, clones, and powerful tech, which opens up all kinds of new avenues for a good old-fashioned cop to get into trouble. The subversions and reworkings of classic tropes are tons of fun to watch. For fans of mystery and whodunnits, these aren’t the most devilishly difficult plots to figure out, but I have a soft spot for stories that let me strap in and enjoy the ride, and Parker’s work hits that spot perfectly.
The setup for this story is classic neo-noir, but it’s the characters that sell it. Zach is a lovable, flatfooted sweetheart . The reader for his character in the audiobook version sells the story perfectly: when he reads a character rolling out of bed, he absolutely sells the exhaustion and discombobulation. The performance made a well written story an absolute treat to listen to.

Zach Forrest is everything you want in an neo-noir cop. Bluff, kind of sweet, kind of clueless around the ladies. Erring on the side of gallant unless you throw a punch. And tired. So. Very. Damn. Tired.

Zach’s friends and enemies are all well-rounded and engaging, all the way from his oily sometimes-informant who goes by a name that includes Voodoo–never a good sign–to the other cops who give him shit down at the station and Andi, his adorkably clueless and sweetly competent AI who may just have a computer-crush on him. She’s a great replacement for the peppy secretary of old-world noir.

Zach’s friends give a strong sense of reality to his life, grounding it in routine and webs of interpersonal relations that are totally believable. And the people he deals with at work are humans with completely human motivations, in all their shop-soiled glory.

Fantastic Cyberpunk!

I am still trying to decide how to word this review. It’s never easy to review an entire series at once, especially one that was out there as this one.

In the future, New Orleans has a section called Easytown where the French Quarter used to be. This is a spot that specializes in nightlife, sex clubs in particular. Except these are no ordinary clubs. They’re filled with sex robots. When patrons start to be murdered, the protagonist Zachary, has to find out who’s responsible.

I loved this series because not only does it have a noir feeling, it holds an interesting balance of technology like cyborgs and artificial intelligence, but it also has plenty of modern day issues like drugs and murder.

Zach is a very shoot first, ask questions later type of main character. He’s confident and not afraid to follow his gut. I didn’t like him at first, but I warmed up to him the longer I listened. All the characters, in fact, are interesting in their own ways. I liked Zach’s assistant Andi in particular.

There are some things in the futuristic world that made me laugh. Such creative worldbuilding all around.

The narrator did an absolutely fantastic job as well. He brought the stories to life.


This book was given to me for free at my request and I provided this voluntary review.

Long and Enjoyable

It's hard to not like a hard boiled detective bent on self destruction. The problem I find is you kinda can realize what's up pretty quick being a bit predictable. Relationships between droids, clones and humans is pretty neat. The relations with some of the moral grey characters is pretty well done toi. The only thing that kind of broke my headspace pretty hard is the pops coming to the big easy. I mean I haven't heard of the pope coming to America let alone a southside chicago equivalent or going to any absolute hell hole. I'd definitely give new books with Forest a listen.