Publisher's Weekly Review
In this superior East Texas crime thriller from Stoker-winner Lansdale (Sunset and Sawdust), Harry Wilkes discovers after a severe childhood ear infection that he has a peculiar "hindsight." Harry can not only see dead people but see and hear violent events as they occurred in the recent or distant past. "It's like I hear and see ghosts in sounds," he tells his father. By the time he's a college student, Harry's psychic abilities have driven him to booze. After meeting alcoholic Tad Peters, a retired martial arts expert, Harry becomes Tad's surrogate son and student. The two forge a pact to sober up together. Their resolve is tested when Harry agrees to help Kayla Jones, an old childhood crush now a cop, solve her father's murder, which her boss, the local police chief, has dismissed as a suicide. Lansdale's down-home prose erupts with explosive twists and razor sharp insights into how "echoes from the original sounds" can never be silenced until action is taken to defeat the fear that created them. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
At the age of six, Harry Wilkes got the mumps, almost died, got better, began to see sounds. "Audiochronology" is like second sight, only it works through sounds that can evoke a violent, brutal, often murderous past. Whatever explains or defines the experience, each occurrence terrifies the adult Harry and makes him desperate to avoid an encore. While he's visiting a friend's apartment, a sound inexplicably triggers a visitation. A man stands before him, shotgun under his chin, and in the next moment, there's "blood, brains, and skull everywhere"--a "trapped memory" verified by subsequent newspaper research. Bunches of doctors can't help Harry, but for a while, booze can. Just as absolute dependency threatens, Harry meets Tad Peters, a philosopher and martial-arts expert with his own alcohol-abuse problems. Their fortuitous encounter leads to a mutual support pact that's soon put to the test in ways neither of them could have predicted. An old murder case gets solved, an old love affair rekindled, and Harry manages to siphon some of the scare out of his unwelcome gift. No doubt there's a leaner, more suspenseful tale struggling to break out of this one. But Lansdale (A Fine Dark Line, 2003, etc.) remains one of the preeminent entertainers in crime fiction. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The prolific Lansdale returns, after sojourns in pulp, sf, and horror, to work his peculiar mojo on the supernatural crime thriller. Harry Wilkes has inherited his family's curse of experiencing dark sounds, full-sensory recordings of traumatic events that can be unleashed by, for example, the banging of a toilet lid upon which a guy once blew his brains out. Booze helps hold the ghosts in the noise at bay, but his life as a drunken recluse isn't going well. He gets things under control with the help of an eccentric sensei named Tad, but when a boyhood girlfriend named Kayla comes home to find her father's killer, Harold grits his teeth and journeys into the dark once more. Lansdale's prose finds the perfect pitch between the laid-back cadences of front-porch storytelling and the thriller's demand for growing urgency. He is a bit unreconstructed when it comes to gender relations--or at least the vocabulary to describe them--but he's got both the charisma and the balls to pull it off. Funny and scary, with a barn-burner ending. --Keir Graff Copyright 2006 Booklist
