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    Play Dead
    Play Dead
    Play Dead
    Audiobook9 hours

    Play Dead

    Written by Anne Frasier

    Narrated by Natalie Ross

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    No one is more familiar with Savannah’s dark side than homicide detective and native resident Elise Sandburg. She’s been haunted for years by her own mysterious past: she was abandoned as a baby in one of the city’s ancient cemeteries, and it’s rumored that she is the illegitimate daughter of an infamous Savannah root doctor. The local Gullah culture of voodoo and magic is one that few outsiders can understand, least of all Elise’s new partner. Now someone is terrorizing the city, creating real-life zombies by poisoning victims into a conscious paralysis that mimics death. As the chilling case unfolds, Elise is drawn back into the haunted past she’s tried so hard to leave behind.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrilliance Audio
    Release dateApr 8, 2014
    ISBN9781480567528
    Play Dead
    Author

    Anne Frasier

    Anne Frasier is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty novels that range from thrillers to memoirs. She is a RITA winner for her romantic suspense books and a recipient of the Daphne du Maurier Award for paranormal romance. Her thrillers have been featured by the Mystery Guild, the Literary Guild, and the Book of the Month Club. Her memoir, The Orchard, received a B+ review in Entertainment Weekly; was an O, The Oprah Magazine "fall pick"; was named an American Library Association "One Book, One Community" read; and was singled out as a Librarians' Best Book of 2011. Her most recent novel, Truly Dead, is the highly anticipated fourth installment in the Elise Sandburg series. Frasier currently divides her time between Saint Paul, Minnesota, and her writing studio in rural Wisconsin.

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    Reviews for Play Dead

    4/5

    64 ratings22 reviews

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    • 4/5
      First I think there are reviews here for a different book and someone at Scribd should really fix this. The book I am reviewing is Play Dead by Anne Frasier and I think some people here are talking about a Harlan Coben book. Anyway, I digress! Here are my thoughts on Play Dead. Overall I enjoyed the story, I don't really like stories about dark magic and new orleans style voodoo stuff but it was okay here. The story takes place in Savannah which was interesting because I just visited there in December of 2021 so it was easy for me to imagine a lot of the settings. I did not know Savannah had a dark magic side to it but it doesn't surprise me that it does. The narrator was very good and I would probably consider checking out other books by this author. There were a few twists in the story and the characters were very likable.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      Disappointing but I stuck with it because I hate to give up on a book! Two dimensional characters implausible plot and a twist at the end which was unpredictable only because it was totally unbelievable.
    • 3/5
      I think the other reviewers have it all wrong. Yes, it's not the greatest book. Yes, you can tell it's written by an inexperienced writer. But reading Coben's first book after others of his only makes you appreciate what an amazing writer he is now. What a great way to show his growth as a writer. And I think that's what he was trying to do by reissuing this book. He talks in the introduction about how in the reissue he doesn't rewrite anything and how he wanted to present it as is. For which I applaud him.

      It's a long book and there are times I just yelled out in frustration at the language and superfluous use of words. But in the end I am appreciating it for what it is. Harlan Coben's first novel.
    • 4/5
      Having fallen in love with the author's other series (Detective Jude Fontaine) I was really excited to start this series.... I was a little bit confused listening to it (maybe due to the narrator being new to my ears) but as the story moved on, I was being pulled into it and was looking forward to finding out more of Elise's background and history plus all the Root magic aspect intrigued me very much.
      The flow and pace were good and easy on the ears and there wasn't any information dump which is something I dislike in mystery novels.
      All in all, am looking forward to continuing with this series.
    • 3/5
      Honestly? I usually enjoy Harlen's books but this one felt to me like it was written by Danielle Steel. Not up to his usual fiction. Disappointing.
    • 3/5
      Not as good as the last one I have read of his, but enjoyable. As it was his first book, it wasn't bad. Predictable and slightly unbeleivable.
    • 2/5
      An undead high school football team plays a championship game against their biggest rivals.
    • 4/5
      This book was a riot to read - the dialogue was whip-smart and funny, and the story flowed smoothly. It was an interesting twist on a zombie tale, mixing Texas football and good old-fashioned witchcraft. Cole Logan and Savannah are a great team, and I cheered for them every step of the way. You kind of have to suspend your disbelief for a while with the zombie parts of the story, but I guess that to be true with any zombie novel really. The bus accident that happens early on in the book is truly horrifying - the author lets you get to know the doomed players on the team, so you really feel Cole's loss when they die. Mixed in with all the zombie mayhem are closer to reality story lines of abusive parents, alcohol and drug addiction, financial duress, and all the emotional fallout that goes along with them. It really is a sports triumph story with a bit a supernatural twist. I look forward to reading the rest of Ryan Brown's stuff. :D
    • 4/5
      I know what you're thinking. Football and zombies? A fantastic and energetic sport combined with the gruesome and not so energetic undead? Well…yeah! When you think about it they're actually pretty similar. In football, players try to kill each other to get control of the ball; zombies…well, they may try to rekill each other to get control of your brains. Stick them together and you've got a winning combination.PLAY DEAD by Ryan Brown was fascinating mainly because I wasn't expecting it, yet it combined two of my favorite things. I love football and I love zombies. I've read a number of stories where the paranormal has been thrown into something pretty well known but this is the first time I personally have seen football hit with the paranormal bug. I'm loving it.The plot for this is pretty straightforward. The Killington High School football team ends up drowning in a river after their bus decided it needed a little bath. Cole, the quarterback and star of the team is the only survivor. Something just isn't right though. Cole has a feeling the accident wasn't truly an accident and he believes that their rivals, Elmwood Heights, is behind the tragedy. So what's a quarterback to do when a major game is coming up and his entire team is dead? Turn to black magic of course!That is some serious commitment to football! The football scholarship on the line may have influenced Cole a bit as well.Successfully risen from the dead, the football team must not only hide their secret from their parents and rest of the town, but fight to actually claim victory in their beloved game as well. There's more than reputation at stake here - their very souls are on the line. Add in a little romantic touch with the coach's daughter, Savannah and Mr. Brown has created a fantastic read.For those readers out there who may be shying away because the book involves football, I'll tell you up front that there are football references within the story. Plays and penalties are explained; famous players are described. I understand the references so I can't make too much of a judgment call as to how easily someone unfamiliar with the sport would be able to understand these references. What I can say, however, is that the general plot of the book will not be lost if you simply skip over the technical passages within the story.Aside from the awesome idea behind this story, my favorite aspect of PLAY DEAD was the writing. The game scenes were described in such a way that it was easy to visualize what was going on. The main characters were developed well and there were even a few side characters that became pretty memorable. Fair warning time: There is a decent amount of cussing throughout the book. Normally that bothers me in a story but oddly enough, it actually flowed well in PLAY DEAD. Who knows, perhaps I’m just predisposed to accepting cussing in football or from the undead. I would recommend this book to any thriller fans out there (and no, I don’t mean Michael Jackson’s Thriller), football fans, or zombie fans. This is a great book for lovers of the game or those who get a certain tingly thrill from reading about decomposing undead.
    • 3/5
      Play Dead. Harlan Coben. 1990. Janet insisted that I had not read all of Coben’s books and she was right. This is his very first novel and his favorite according to Coben. A star professional basketball player and his former model/fashion designer girl friend off to Australia to marry. Laura goes to a business meeting and returns to the hotel to find David missing. David apparently drowned, and Laura returns to Boston. Odd things start to happen and Laura begins to think David was murdered. As always Coben leaves you hanging at the end of each chapter. We switch between Laura, her parents, David’s best friend, her sister, and David’s brother. The book is a little long, but a pleasant non-exacting novel to read.
    • 1/5
      This book was so deadly awful that I’m not even going to grace it with a synopsis except for this: an unbelievably gorgeous ex-model and current fashion mogul gets married to an unbelievably handsome and talented basketball star. They have to elope because her mother inexplicably hates the guy. While on the honeymoon, she has to go to some business meeting (at his insistence of course) and while she’s gone he mysteriously drowns. His best friend TC flies from Boston and identifies the body. Now the wonder woman must get to the bottom of this. She is tipped off that something weird is going on because $500K disappears from one of his accounts (now hers after like 2 days of marriage).Of course he’s not really dead. A mysterious newcomer who spectacularly makes the Celtics new starting line up has a ‘fade away dunk’ like the dead guy’s. and now they’re calling him White Lightning II. Oh puleeze.Turns out that he disappeared because the model’s mother went to Australia (where they were secretly eloping) and told him that he couldn’t stay married to her daughter because he is her brother. She had an affair with his father years ago and the model (who used to be a fat ugly girl but is so spectacular now that the author had to keep reminding us of her fabulous body and mind-numbingly beautiful face over and over and over and over) is the result of the affair.In another completely unbelievable twist, the mother of the model is wrong about the paternity of her child even though she hadn’t been sleeping with her husband for 2 months before conception. You see, the husband found out she was pregnant with another man’s child, killed the father and then drugged the mother so he could abort the child. The mother thought she was just having morning sickness (I guess the author also expected us to think she ignored the weeks of bleeding afterwards too, thinking that’s what a normal pregnancy was like!) then the mother’s plan to seduce the father over and over so he would think the kid was his.The writing of this book was idiotic to the point of hilarity. I mean it was awful. One of the worst things I have ever come across. If I still had the wretched thing here I could open it to any page and copy and example. If I hadn’t read the other Coben book first, I certainly never would have. I probably won’t read another because basically the two I read were exact duplicates in terms of story. The characters were terrible and about as deep as a cat box.
    • 4/5
      This book comes with a chummy introduction by the author much like the ones you sometimes get in Stephen King novels, warning the reader that this is an early book and not up to the same standards as his most recent stuff. This had the effect of reducing my expectations to near zero, but having finished it I'd have to say this is as good as anything else I've read by him, and in some cases, better. It has an airier feel - more breathing space, fewer wisecracks (though I don't always dislike those).If I'm going to find fault, it's going to be with the whodunnit element - there weren't enough characters to make it a challenge. I did guess the 'why' as well as the 'who' and i don't manage that very often. And why why why do all the female characters have to have perfect bodies? The fact that they all have to be candidates for Mensa as well doesn't make it right.But the book had me gripped from page one, even after I had guessed at the secrets. It keeps events coming thick and fast, and ultimately it goes the way the reader wants it to.
    • 4/5
      My reading of the Coben library is complete now that I have completed his first published novel. And I have to extend a large thank you to whomever had the brilliance to republish this book as I've been on the hunt for it for at least a year to no avail. Coben is a master at thrillers and plot twists and it's only gotten better over the years. The only hang up I had on this book was that no one would figure out Baskin's secret, but it was a page-turner to the very end.
    • 1/5
      I would disagree with Adpaton's review only in so far as I did think that this book was, at various points laugh-out-loud awful. It is impossible to exaggerate just how dire the writing is. It could very well be used for a "how not to do it" writer's workshop. Approached from that perspective, the book can actually be quite rewarding. (Surely, surely, he won't digress from the action for yet another pointless flashback that adds nothing to the story....oh yes he will.....)I bought the book very cheaply on the Kindle bookstore so the only positive point I can cite is that at least I haven't been responsible for setting loose another physical copy of this book in the wild (it certainly wouldn't have been staying on my bookshelf!).
    • 5/5
      WOW! I think that's a good word for this book. This is a book that Harlan Coben wrote but never published - I'm not sure what made him to decide to publish it now but I'm glad he did. It was really good. I must say that I thought some of it was a little far fetched but Harlan does a very good job at stringing you along with no clear answers for a long time leaving you guessing the whole time. Definite recommend for anyone who likes a good mystery/suspense.
    • 5/5
      Awesome! I started to read in hospital and could not put it down even though I was in pain after surgery. This is a real page turner.Coben really had fun with the characters making u guess who was the murderer. I won't be giving anything away, but it was a thriller from start to finish!!!
    • 3/5
      enjoyed this, the writing was simple and probably predictble but still worth a red
    • 4/5
      Harlan Coben's first book, PLAY DEAD, had been out of print. It's reissued in paperback now.A gorgeous model marries a Boston Celtics basketball player who disappears and is supposedly found dead. But something's going on that's fishy-fishy.And so the reader is taken for a ride as everyone seems suspect of something. And another basketball player shows up whose moves on the court are mighty suspect.Coben prefaces this book with a plea for readers who haven't read his other, later books: please don't read this one first, he says,So I was all set to dislike PLAY DEAD. But I didn't.I looked for something to be wrong, and here were my problems with it:The awful brotherThe endIf you like Coben's books, you will this one, too. Don't be put off by his preface.
    • 3/5
      Once upon a time I was marooned in hospital with nothing to read and, desperate, I accepted the loan of Danielle Steele's 'The Promise'. What a book! It was written in 1978 and very likely was a major influence on Harlan Coben back in the days before he became Harlan Coben because nothing else can explain 'Play Dead'. Written in 1989, this is a seriously bad book and once again I am shocked by the publisher's greed in trying to make even more money out of a successful writer by publishing his juvenalia; I am also surprised that Harlan Coben allowed it - although, to do him justice, he does state in a preface that this is not a book of which he is particuarly proud and advises novice Coben readers to cut their teeth on something else. Coben is one of my favourite writers but had this been the first of his books I read, it would also have been my last because it really is pretty dire. Not laugh-out-loud 'Gosh this book is hilariously badly-written' dire, just average dire - but dire none the less. Unrecognisably dire. Enough with the dire: there's this incredibly beautiful sexy supermodel with her own clothing line, Laura Ayers, who secretly marries this incredibly talented, handsome basketball player David Baskin, and they go on a romantic honeymoon on the Australian Gold Coast. Sun, sea and sex - lots of it, because these two incredibly yada yada people just can't get enough of each other's incredibly hot bodies. And in case we forget, Coban keeps reminding us of their incredible hotness.But then oh dear, hubbie David disapears, goes for a swim one night and despite being an incredibly strong and experienced swimmer he disappears: a battered corpse emerges from the briney depths a few days later and is identified by his best friend, a policeman, who has flown over from the States. Laura is incredibly gutted, natch, and almost falls apart - but her sister and her best friend are there to help her pull herself together so she is well enough to attend a tribute to David at his old basketball grounds. She watches a match played by his old team and sees he has been replaced by this incredibly handsome buff new player whose moves are so similar to those of her late husband as to be almost identical. Really, it's just incredible. Laura is strangely drawn to the stranger...In Danielle Steele's book, the heroine is persuaded to abandon her fiance for his own good, and undergoes intensive plastic surgery that transforms her into a completely different and even more beautiful woman. Despite her best intentions however, she meets up with her ex [who has been told she is dead] and he is strangely drawn to her...In Play Dead, one of the characters undergoes extensive plastic surgery and has a secret to hide. I'm not saying who because that would spoil the book for you so I'll just mention that he flew back to the States from Australia and David's best friend the policeman is helping him start a new life. However, as far as I can recall, no one in The Promise is so deadset on keeping the lovers apart that they are prepared to committ murder while in Coben's book the corpse rate mounts up. There's a secret in the past which must be protected at all costs: we are given hints of it throughout and the whole thing is predictable, very unlikely and totally preposterous. None of those three factors is out of place in a well-written novel, twists and turns, red herrings and shocks all add to the fun: but this is not a well-written novel and, to me at least, contains no glimmer of the brilliance which now marks Coban's work. Quite incredible.
    • 3/5
      Considering this novel was his first and written over 20 years ago, it's not bad. It has all the earmarks of a Coben plot, with many twists along the way. But he has so greatly inproved in his writing technique, character and plot development. Now when I pick up one of his books, by the last page, my head is hurting from all the plot twists that you never could figure out until the last page. Here, I saw them coming and had everything worked out before the last page. However, I did enjoy the book, it was still a page turner, and it was interesting to read his first effort, but I am grateful that Coben has grown as an author. Hey, everyone has to start somewhere.
    • 2/5
      Although this was just released (without revisions) in 2010, you can tell it is an early work by Coben. Reads like a soap opera and you could see the ending coming a mile away. I skipped parts just to get through it. So glad his writing has improved.
    • 5/5
      Not being much of one for zombie thrillers, I opened this book with a bit of trepidation. Oh ... my .... goodness!! WHAT a TOTally fun book!!! I zinged through it in less than 24 hours ... and it's not a small book!You'll be smack-dab entranced within the first 10 pages .. I kid you not! There are zingers and twists and little tidbits that make you chuckle. You have the obligatory "boy meets girl, girl hates boy, boy hates her back" type of romantic entanglement, BUT you have so much more! The action is fast-paced, the characters are believable (even if what happens to some of them is not), the writing is engaging and funny.A couple of my favorite lines:"I think you're going to have to kill him, Logan""Why?""'Cause he said the game would only happen over his dead body.""Shit.""It's Hubie. Freddy's in the crapper.""When's he back?""Oh, I'd say about two Marlboro's and an Archie comic from now." Maybe I'm twisted (well, alright, maybe I am, just a little), those lines just cracked me up!! (You'll have to read the book to see why!) Seriously, buy it!!