
The Dead Do Not Improve
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Feodor Chin
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By:
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Jay Caspian Kang
About this listen
Hailed as The Awl's 2012 novel to anticipate, this glorious debut stars hippie detectives, a singular city, and an MFA student on the run.
On a residential Bay Area block struggling with the collision of gentrifier condos and longtime residents, stymied recent MFA grad Philip Kim is sleeping the night away when bullets fly through a window in his apartment building and end up killing one of his neighbors. Philip only learns about the murder the next day, when bored and Googling himself. But when he gets caught up in the investigation and becomes the focus of an elaborate, violent scheme, he will learn far more than he ever wanted to about his former four-eggs-at-a-time borrowing neighbor, Dolores Stone, aka "The Grey Beaver", and her shocking connections to an underworld only a city like this one could create.
Siddhartha “Sid” Finch, a homicide detective bitter about everything (except his gorgeous wife) and his phlegmatic, pock-marked partner Jim Kim land the case. Sid and Jim race after Philip through a menacing, unknowable San Francisco, fending off militant surfers, vaguely European cafe habitués, and aggressive Advanced Creative Writing students as they all try to figure out just who’s causing trouble in this city they love to hate.
Unique, pulsing with vigor and heart, and loaded with fierce, fresh language, The Dead Do Not Improve confirms Jay Caspian Kang as a true American original, as obsessed with surfing and surviving as with the power of unforgettable storytelling.
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Critic reviews
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- JC
- 09-17-12
Audible and Amazon have refused to help me
Would you try another book from Jay Caspian Kang and/or Feodor Chin?
Now audible and amazon have asked me to "help" them by reviewing this book. I don't really feel like telling other customers anything about this book when my own basic needs as a customer have been ignored
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