Dead on Arrival audiobook

I'm unsure how to write this review without spoilers because what worked so well about the book is is that I knew absolutely nothing about it going into it. That made the twists and shock factor of the storyline terrific. DON'T READ SPOILERS ABOUT THIS BOOK!That said, a plane is forced to make an emergency landing in a somewhat remote location in CO. Everyone on the ground is dead - or are they? The cockpit crew looks out on the plane to find the same thing with exception of two people. What happens next is a bizarre and, ironically, a very timely tale given a recent news release from a global company. I was searching for another of Richtel's novels, The Doomsday Equation, about which I've heard great things and came across this instead. I'm very glad I did. It's a thriller, suspense, and very prophetic. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Just imagine. You've landed at a small regional airport somewhere in the Rocky Mountains. The world has gone silent. There's nothing but static on every channel on the radio. The body of a man in a jumpsuit lies sprawled on the tarmac, and human figures inside the terminal are motionless. Is this beginning of a dystopian tale? Will people everywhere be victims of a mysterious pandemic? Or is something else happening here?In Matt Richtel's debut novel, Dead on Arrival, something else is definitely going on. As will quickly become apparent, what appears to be a pandemic is somehow related to a top-secret project at Google. There, a small team of brilliant engineers is exploring the connection between information overload, memory, and attention. Has the experiment gone awry? We'll find out.Dead on Arrival is loosely based on contemporary neurological research that is turning up disturbing findings. The information overload to which so many of us are subject through our mobile devices and social media is a problem on many levels. First, the information glut that keeps us glued to our screens can impair working (short-term) memory. Second, information overload is causing many of us to suffer from decision fatigue. Third, as The Economist has noted, "information overload can make people feel anxious and powerless: scientists have discovered that multitaskers produce more stress hormones." Lastly, our marriage with social media may be driving us apart, causing us to drift ever closer to political extremes (although some studies question this assertion). Matt Richtel has built his novel around these questions, speculating that the potential exists for electronic media to impact us in far worse ways.Matt Richtel won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles at the New York Times about distracted driving. He later wrote a bestselling nonfiction book on the topic, A Deadly Wandering. Before writing Dead on Arrival, Richtel studied the impact on the human brain of living with "a deluge of data" from digital devices. He shared the thought that children's brains are developing differently from those of their parents and others of older generations. Richtel, a graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, holds a Master's degree from the Columbia School of Journalism.

ScienceThrillers review: You cannot top the opening of Pulitzer prizewinning author Matt Richtel’s new techno-paranoid nightmare, DEAD ON ARRIVAL. For thriller setups, this is gold: A small commercial jet lands at a smallish commercial airport, at night, in the winter. Communications from the ground had ceased minutes before. The airport is dark. No one, nothing is moving or greets the plane. The creepiness and mystery play out for 150 pages, split into two sections by an interlude from three years earlier. Then something else entirely happens. The compulsion to find out what’s really going on guaranteed that I would keep reading.Based on online reviews, readers are polarized by this book. Some love it, some hate it. I think part of the issue is expectations. Richtel sets up a stunning, action/plague thriller opening but the long middle of the book does not read like that kind of story. It’s more literary, cerebral. Richtel has a particular style of psychological writing, using subtext and asides to enhance the dialog. Not everyone will like it. But for those who do, it’s a home run. In addition, the protagonist, like others in Richtel’s books, is a flawed and at times unlikeable human being. For some readers, dislike for a main character directly transfers into dislike for the story.I’m a fan of Richtel’s work and I like the way he plays with a book’s reality–always slippery, uncertain. Things you think are true may not always be what they appear. DEAD ON ARRIVAL targets themes that run through both his fiction and investigative journalism: an unease with the extremes to which technology is dragging us, a questioning of the assumptions of Silicon Valley. DEAD ON ARRIVAL is a scary story for our time.

So while you're on a plane trip, a super-bug hits and everyone who isn't on your plane dies. That's how the book *starts.* It doesn't go great for the cast of characters in the book from there. Bad stuff happening in the midst of a plane trip isn't a super-fun thing for those who travel in the holiday season, but at least no one on the plane turns into vampires with tentacles that zap out of their mouths like "The Strain." This is a tense thriller that seems like it should have already been a movie. It's available in convenient book form. Read it, but preferably not during a plane ride.

Genuinely scary. It would be hard to imagine a more timely novel than DEAD ON ARRIVAL, which starts as a Twilight Zone episode and becomes an all-too-plausible cautionary tale about the destructive force of our mobile devices. This may be the book that breaks your texting habit.

The cover copy wants you to think only Stephen King meets Michael Crichton, and while that’s certainly fair, I’d certainly like to toss in Dan Brown and the TV cop procedural Criminal Minds.The show usually hinges on an obviously deranged “unsub” (unidentified subject) whom the good guys nail at the end, sometimes with some special obsession based on one of them. That’s how Dead on Arrival ends. Anything more and it’s spoiler territory. It is what it is. Richtel borrows Harrison Ford as a model for his main character from Dan Brown (in case you still have Tom Hanks’ mullet on the brain, that’s actually how Robert Langdon is described in the books, as an Indiana Jones cool professor who actually looks like Indiana Jones). The writing is much the same template, although you’d be forgiven for overlooking that fact by Brown’s penchant for city tours and frequent adrenaline spikes where Richtel favors deliberate buildup and decent insight into psychology.His cast of characters otherwise are a Stephen King set exploring a Michael Crichton crisis, although his Chekov’s Gun fires differently and, well, usually Crichton would just spend time whittling down his cast. Richtel does chart his own course, focusing on the latent distrust of modern technology you can find in ordinary society rather than in som fanciful thought experiment.The funniest thing is that he wrote this just a few years before 2020 did its level best to fulfill exactly what Richtel’s antagonist most feared, and…we actually survived that. Somehow. Much of 2021 was focused simultaneously telling us we didn’t but also proving that we did.Life is strange like that. A thriller like this helps explain our fears to us. It’s worth a read.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was getting into when I started this. I'd seen it on a library blog about good upcoming horror novels, and requested it, and ended up finishing it in one giant bite.I think I was expecting zombies, and it certainly wasn't that. But it was very good! Gave me the creepy crawlies.

Great characters and a thrilling plot. I'll definitely have to read more of Matt Richtel's books.

Reviewed by: Demetrius Svette*This book was provided for an honest reviewFirst off, this epic and brilliant story written by Matt Richtel will leave you paranoid through the rest of your life… or for a while, at least. Richtel somehow acquires the perfect set of skills that reached out and got under my skin in this haunting, and yet disturbing, thriller as you are bumping through the pages with twists and paranoia through the whole journey as he unfolds the virus’s secrets. Lisa Gardner compared Matt Richtel as “Michael Crichton meets Stephen King at their finest,” which grabbed my attention to review this book. She hit the nail on the head on that one. It starts off with Flight 194 landing as the world became dark; as they land, they come in contact with their worst fears. The details and skills that Richtel includes in his writing is so enriching that it keeps you grasping your pages as if they were a blanket covering your face. They realize soon enough in the story that this is an epidemic and with the main character Dr. Lyle Martin- a world-class infectious disease specialist- a new kind of lethal virus has surfaced that has affected the world, including Martin. Martin will take you on a journey you will never forget and will make your mind go blank at times with the shocking results he will find, as this new virus is nothing like he has ever seen before. Dr. Lyle Martin and a few others, as they land, will come to the conclusion that everyone has died- the remaining that survives is no bigger than a handful- as they continue on to solve the mystery behind the virus that is running rampant. Will he ever know how for it goes as he investigates thoroughly to know how he can cure the problem? At what risks will he take to solve the cat and mouse game that is more of a breaded crumb tale of the best psychological thriller that Richtel has provided for us? My conclusion is, to everyone who reads this, be weary of what will come with the magic within his words; through every page, it will grip you tighter and tighter as you read on. You will not be able to put it down until the end. Dead on Arrival is one of the best books that I have read this year. Richtel pulls you in from the very beginning, taking you back in time to fill in the characters plots, and makes you feel the connection between them as if his details brings you through and you do not know what is reality or not. Richtel is very professional and great story telling to its finest. In my eyes, he will forever be known as the person to make me rethink my knowledge and succumb my fears over the technology we have in our existence. I look forward to reading anything he comes out with, definitely with his imagination and his power of writing.

"A man in an orange jumpsuit, lying on the ground beside a luggage transporter; two other workers toppled upon each other; a desolate hangar to the right; and the clincher--inside the window of a small airport, a half-dozen would-be passengers or staff. Motionless.'As near as we can tell,' Eleanor said. 'Everyone out there is dead.'"4.5/5 starsDead on Arrival is not, as I initially expected, Plague Inc.: The Novelisation. It's also not, as I expected a fifth of the way through, a zombie story. It is a high-octane combination of jump scare and Lovecraftian horror, interspersed with a refined if not unique perspective on our world today. In that sense, it's truly a novel of the Information Age.By no means is this a perfect book. But, in my opinion, it fulfils nearly to a tee the criteria that make for a good thriller. The opening chapters raise a plethora of questions, not the least of which is plainly 'What the hell is going on', and from there on the pace is tight until the end. I was never bored throughout the duration of reading; I often had to cover the last page of a chapter to stop myself from skipping ahead and seeing the inevitable twist. Some of those twists are admittedly cheaper nothing burgers, but in many places they defy expectations in the best of ways.To explain just how much Dead on Arrival captivated me, it took two of my least favourite plot devices, non-linear timelines and (view spoiler)[amnesia (hide spoiler)], and made me not mind--or even enjoy--them. I've avoided reading books before solely because they contain messy chronology, but this book doesn't use flashbacks as a lazy method of exposition. Rather, the "three years ago" timeline has a life of its own, with characters and mysteries as significant as those in the present day. Indeed, when the elements of the two meet in the last section, it's a hugely rewarding payoff. The ending? Without revealing any spoilers, it was close enough to what I thought would happen but utterly unpredictable on the how, such that it kept me guessing to the end. And with spoilers: (view spoiler)[The Well-Intentioned Extremist may be beaten to death in the genre, but this novel's villain is a surprisingly refreshing take on the trope. Not least, I suspect, because she's a woman with a villainous crush (hide spoiler)].The concept of technology's dark side has been alive for as long as technology itself, with the most extreme critics declaring innovation across the board to be evil. What I find impressive about Dead on Arrival is that it tackles the problems spawned by technology without attacking technology itself, providing a mostly even-handed overview of its effects on societal polarisation. Yes, it's a popcorn novel and of course you shouldn't read too much into it (as I am now), but I consider the concept well-executed considering how much of the plot is built around it.I'm going to talk about the characters for a moment here. We've got, first of all, Dr. Lyle Martin, the overall protagonist and main narrator of the present day. Maybe I differ from other readers in that I find him more compelling than the average hero in a thriller. He's a disgraced, disillusioned doctor whose mental issues are always just unsettling enough to leave you wondering at the reliability of his narration. At the same time, it's clear that he's absolutely brilliant. Nowadays, it's all too easy to make the eccentric genius character into, for lack of a better word, an asshole. Lyle Martin may be an asshole sometimes, but unlike most other such characters in popular fiction, he's also strangely sympathetic, even if you sometimes want to face palm at his inability to articulate himself clearly.Then there's Jackie Badger, main narrator of the timeline three years ago. She is herself an analytical prodigy, yet firmly relatable as she gradually unearths the secrets of Silicon Valley. There's not much more I can say about her without giving out spoilers, but she is definitely hiding some secrets of her own--it wouldn't be a thriller otherwise, would it? (view spoiler)[I was with her up until almost the end. Even at the meeting when she framed Alex. Goddamnit, Jackie, why. (hide spoiler)]Read it. Just read it and find out, and no matter what, don't skip ahead.["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>["br"]>

Big thanks to William Morrow for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion. Seeing a book being dubbed a cross between King's The Stand and Crichton's Terminal Man. there's no way that I could pass it up! DEAD ON ARRIVAL by Matt Richtel is another apocalyptic/end of the world thriller. This one is more in the vein of possibility - I've noticed that with a lot of more recent apocalyptic novels. What would you do if you got off an airplane to discover everyone on the ground was dead?Dr. Lyle Martin is on a flight to a desolate airport in Colorado. Upon landing, he realizes that the world outside of their airplane is dead - or at least they appear to be. Dr. Martin is a world class specialist of infectious diseases, so curiosity gets the best of him and ventures out of the plane to do some tests. He learns that those affected aren't dead, they're simply nonfunctioning. What has caused this widespread sickness? Is it terrorists with a biological attack? A natural occurrence? I will say that this book started off great. The pacing is great and Richtel immediately draws you in. I had to know what was happening and more importantly why? There's not doubt that Richtel is a great writer - I just wasn't a fan of the ending or some of the back and forth in the timelines. The technology element and it's causes for this phenomena is very eerie because what he says about how we are with technology now is incredibly accurate. Overall, this was a great end of the world thriller with some good technological elements. This had great pacing - just don't go into it expecting something similar to The Stand. I give this 3.5/5 stars! (rounded up for rating)

I actually really enjoyed this book. It draws you in from the prologue and even though it switches from the main excitement every once in a while it still keeps you on the edge of your seat until the very end. Literally the climax was like on the 2nd to last page. But the ending was still satisfying. Really the only problem with this book was the disconnect I felt with Lyle for part of it. Matt Richtel did a really great job at explaining why I was feeling that disconnect though, as part of Lyle's character development and it worked out for him in the end. Also the word 'miasma' was used like 40 times. But it's whatever I guess. It probably just stood out because it's not a frequently used word for me(view spoiler)[ Jackie's motivation was a little bit strange, considering it was in part an obsession with Dr. Martin and the other part was to stop all the violence and death in the world, even though she didn't care if people died while under her control. (hide spoiler)]Overall I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys well written thrillers with a bit of mystery and puzzle.***Thanks to the publisher for providing my copy of this book. All opinions and thoughts in this review are my own***

While they were in the air, the world changed. Flight 194 landed. Something lethal awaits outside. Shortly after landing, Dr. Lyle Martin, a world class infectious desease specialist, is brusquely awaken to shocking news- everyone not on the plan appears to be dead. The world has gone dark. While they were in the air, a lethal new kind of virus surfaced, threatening mankind's survival and now Martin is at the center of the investigation. I really, really liked this book. I thought the story was very gripping and it was hard for me to put down. I loved watching the puzzle pieces connect and the story unfold. Was it a perfect book? No. There were a few questions that never really got answered. What was the point of Steamboat? Why did the old man die? How did nobody outside of Steamboat realize something was wrong? How did everyone get back from Steamboat? What happened to Denny? How did more people not die from this (crash their cars, fatal falls, etc.)? Yes, several questions. But even with this slightly confusing questions, I really enjoyed the story. I was on the edge of my seat waiting to see what was going to happen next. I would check out other work by this author.

Dead On Arrival starts with a tremendous premise. What happens if, when you land at your airport, everybody at the airport is dead? Matt Richtel employs this head scratching and promising scenario to great advantage in this highly anticipated thriller that reminds the reader of Stephen King and other gifted horror and thriller writers.As the story begins, a plane is landing in Colorado. All is seemingly well until the pilot notices a distinct lack of activity on the ground as well as communication problems with airport personnel. Is the problem local, regional, or worldwide? And what exactly is going on?I will not delve further into this outstanding and creepy novel. Suffice it to say that the book is full of unique characters, plot twists, and turns, and has a message about the ubiquity of computers of all kinds.Dead On Arrival lands on August first. Be sure to meet it at the gate, if you dare.

I jumped into this book expecting a fresh take on a post-apocalyptic novel. It's not. It's a rollercoaster ride of a psychological thriller with a large dollop of spooky science and a dash of conspiracy theory—all things I enjoyed thoroughly. Richtel's characters are both deeply flawed and beautifully human. As the reader discovers more and more about them, the tale develops a richness that one only finds in a psychological thriller. You find yourself rooting for the MC and desperately trying to figure out who his nemesis is.It's a tale of two geniuses—one with a driving need to heal and the other seeking only to destroy. Richtel lets us delve into the minds of each before drawing us into the final showdown.Jump into this book with your eyes open, ready for the story to take you places you were never expecting. It's a hell of a ride.

I received this from a Goodreads giveaway. I liked it very much. I would have liked it a lot more if it weren't so produced. For example, I fully feel the publisher/author are going for a Professor Langdon type of series here and I fully expect a new book to come soon -- not that I mind, just that I felt at the very end of the book that it was all a big set-up for the next one to come.... I was fully shoked that the author was able to use Google so much as the plot line without a cease & desist. I still look at this book often because I want to make my husband read it because I want to hear his take on all the nefarious things from Google in this book, but he hasn't yet read it. Grrrr.