Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Leather Maiden
    Leather Maiden
    Leather Maiden
    Audiobook9 hours

    Leather Maiden

    Written by Joe R. Lansdale

    Narrated by Tom Butler-Bowdon

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Edgar Award winner Joe R. Lansdale writes outrageous fiction that rockets along with violent spikes of action and intense humor. Gulf War vet Cason Statler has moved back to his East Texas hometown after losing his job as a reporter in Houston (sleeping with both the boss' wife and 30-year-old stepdaughter has a way of ruining career prospects). But when his new gig has him investigating a local girl's disappearance, Cason opens a can of worms that might get him killed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJan 9, 2009
    ISBN9781436185547
    Leather Maiden
    Author

    Joe R. Lansdale

    Joe R. Lansdale is the winner of the British Fantasy Award, the American Horror Award, the Edgar Award, and six Bram Stoker Awards. He lives in Nacogdoches, Texas.

    More audiobooks from Joe R. Lansdale

    Related to Leather Maiden

    Related audiobooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Four Best Audiobooks Of June To Take You Places

      Jun 23, 2020

      Hardboiled mysteries, obscure farming communities, and tales of home and family provide ample entertainment in June’s audiobook roundup.

      2 min read

    • Article

      Paperback ghostwriter!

      Mar 9, 2023

      Paperback ghostwriter!
      9 min read

    • Article

      Righteous

      Jan 22, 2019

      Righteous
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Art Of Conversation

      Nov 1, 2023

      The Art Of Conversation
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Duplex

      Jun 9, 2020

      I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart. My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey,

      21 min read

    • Article

      Not That Story

      Oct 28, 2017

      Not That Story
      7 min read

    • Article

      FOGO versus FOMO

      Mar 8, 2023

      FOGO versus FOMO
      6 min read

    • Article

      LeTteR Bocks

      Aug 4, 2022

      ◻PLEASE find attached this trademark from a box of eggs, which appears to show a chicken lifting its leg to crack off an eggy one. Susan Butcher, Australia ◻FORMER Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been criticised for meeting an ex-KGB agent without h

      13 min read

    • Article

      Nose For A Story

      Feb 22, 2024

      Nose For A Story
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Turn

      Aug 14, 2019

      HERE’S a story. In college I entered the spring semester of my freshman year on academic probation. There wasn’t one reason this happened. There were many. I had signed up for a computer science class called Digital Security with no programming knowl

      5 min read

    • Article

      Tc Boyle Profile

      May 15, 2019

      BECAUSE WE’RE ANIMALS: Seven conversations from an afternoon with T. C. Boyle By Peter Nowogrodzki T.C. Boyle is standing at the front gate entrance to his Montecito home—an imposing Frank Lloyd Wright structure clad in long horizontal slats of redwo

      26 min read

    • Article

      The Convict

      Jul 10, 2020

      The Convict
      5 min read

    • Article

      From ATOPIA

      Jan 1, 2019

      See, the thing is poet, is that you’re failing.You’re failing at capitalism.You’re failing at “self-care.”You’re failing at feminism.You’re failing at activism.You’ve fallen deep into your addiction.Your despair spreads everywhere.None of this is you

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Joy Of Quitting

      May 19, 2019

      The Joy Of Quitting
      7 min read

    • Article

      'Wow, No Thank You': Samantha Irby Returns With An Antidote To Your Coronavirus Funk. You're Welcome.

      Apr 22, 2020

      CHICAGO - I should've written this Q&A with Samantha Irby about "Wow, No Thank You" - her latest incisive and brilliantly ribald essay collection - days ago. But, like many during this coronavirus moment, I couldn't focus. Instead, I found respite in

      5 min read

    • Article

      Watch Your Step

      Nov 19, 2020

      Watch Your Step
      5 min read

    • Article

      Take a Writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair with Kingsley Amis

      Aug 24, 2018

      1. As much as I may rack my brain, there are 15 minutes or so in the dark that I can’t account for and that I’ll never get back—15 minutes during which, I have to think, that creep’s hands were touching my body. It’s a weird thing to think about all

      12 min read

    • Article

      PATRICK GOWER: On Paddy

      Sep 11, 2022

      PATRICK GOWER: On Paddy
      10 min read

    • Article

      Hollywood, Ending

      Feb 13, 2018

      Hollywood, Ending
      7 min read

    • Article

      Comic Timing

      Feb 2, 2023

      Comic Timing
      7 min read

    • Article

      Never Meet YOUR HEROES?

      Apr 2, 2020

      Never Meet YOUR HEROES?
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Leather Maiden

    3.5/5

    99 ratings6 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      “It was a woman, withered and mummified like the other; another leather maiden,...”The main character in this book is the great-grandson of Sunset Jones, the main character in Lansdale‘s “Sunset and Sawdust“! I kind of love it when authors do that! As for this book, it's pretty good! Crime, confusion, killing, and DVDs abound! The character of Booger is absolutely insane! And Lansdale's ability to write dialogue, and scribe some of the most amazing metaphors*, makes this a fun book to read. Not as fun as a Hap and Leonard adventure, but fun!* for example - "It was a bright day, the sunlight like a burst egg yolk running all over the sidewalk and through the yards,..."
    • 4/5
      One of the reasons I like a series is that there is an understanding, for the most part, that the good guys will still be alive at the end of the book. When you read a standalone like this there is a sense of dread that anything can happen, anyone can die. At least with a first-person narrator there's one guy you feel sure will make it. It it's still scary. I enjoyed this, sense of dread notwithstanding. Not quite as funny as other Lansdales, but just as disturbed.
    • 3/5
      In Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale, a Gulf War veteran finds his way back home after being fired from a Houston paper, and winds up working for the small town paper of Camp Rapture. Rifling through his predecessor's desk, he finds notes on the disappearance of a girl named Caroline and decides to pursue the mystery.

      With high hopes after just reading The Bottoms, I cracked open Leather Maiden with anticipation, and at first, it seemed like it was going to be just as good. Lansdale's humor shines in this one, with rapid back-and-forth exchanges reminiscent of a 1940s screwball comedy. The banter and wit flies off the page, especially in the newspaper office itself. The mystery itself is intriguing at first. Caroline, to all appearances, was a promising young woman, studious, beautiful, and kept to herself. As the protagonist digs deeper into the mystery, however, he begins to find that Caroline was not all she seemed.

      The problem was that the book seemed to lose steam and cohesion around the halfway mark. Two new characters, the Geek and Glug, are introduced, and the description of them is spine-tingling. Their actual appearance, however, fails to live up to their hype. The Geek speaks a bunch of pseudo-intellectual nonsense about how "humans" are all playing a game, he's the only one who knows it, etc. It was all very high school "no one understands me, I'm the only one who gets it" dramatics. While I will admit that this is probably very true to life, I don't read a book about murderers to find them as banal as in real life.

      Even the "reveal" is weak - what should have been an "aha!" moment, where everything came together and made sense, just felt like a bunch of unrelated events loosely tied together with the idea that it was all a "game". It was like a prank. A prank, ideally, should be original, take skill, and possibly even send a message. Most pranks, however, are copied from ideas on the Internet and are jejune and insipid. The motive and method of these killers leans towards the latter. Nothing connected in a meaningful way, it didn't send a message, it didn't even really make sense. It was just a bunch of random events that fit into the killers' master plan, which was to... commit a bunch of random acts?

      Then there was the character of Booger, who seemed unnecessary and cartoonish. Booger is supposed to be a war buddy of the main character's and is painted in such over-the-top imagery and one-liners that he was honestly a little buffoonish, like a character from a Will Ferrell comedy wandered into a Shakespearean play. He proudly proclaims he's a sociopath, so he gets the killers (again, this is meant to be threatening, I guess, or scary - instead it just comes across as a high schooler trying to tell you how tough he is, man). His presence is also unnecessary. Reading it, I was left with the realization that nearly everything he did could have been done by the main character alone. The only reason to have him was so as not to soil our sympathy for the main character by having him commit morally questionable acts. Actually, that probably would have made the protagonist more interesting in the long run.

      Finally, the ending, which I won't spoil too much except to say, Really? That cliche has been used, abused, and taken out back and shot - for good reason. And the bad guys were built up so much that the ending felt... unsatisfying. What should have been a climactic show-down just turned into a, "Oh. That's it?"

      Overall, I'd actually rate Leather Maiden a 2.5. The beginning is strong, with deft humor and an intriguing mystery. The scene with Ronnie's mother and her description of Caroline is absolutely chilling. Unfortunately, Lansdale's build-up to the killers ended up being more frightening than the killers themselves.
    • 2/5
      Normally I enjoy Lansdale’s books, but this one disappointed me. It was too gruesome in some places, and I’m afraid the psychotic “friend” who loves weapons and pops up just in time to help the protagonist has been done to death in crime fiction books. Also the author’s excessive use of "down-home" similes was getting to me after a while. The story itself was fine, but I don’t think the author developed the main characters enough. Good enough for a quick read if you like this type of story, but definitely not a keeper.
    • 3/5
      Leather Maiden is a ride through hell you won't soon forget, though perhaps you may want to. Its protagonist is an Iraq War veteran with a few issues, such as his inability to understand that his ex-girlfriend doesn't want to see him any more. This doesn't prevent him from moving back to his hometown and cruising by her veterinary office a few times each day.He takes a job for the town newspaper, because, before a little incident with a former boss's wife and stepdaughter, he was a Pulitzer Prize nominated journalist in Houston. After that incident, I guess a few years in the Army seemed like a good idea. Rather than write columns on gardening, he decides to start investigating the unsolved disappearance of a beautiful college student named Caroline. And then a giant hand reaches up out of a sewer and pulls him down to hell!Well, not actually, but figuratively. Luckily, as his investigation reveals one awful thing after another, even involving his own family, his sociopathic war buddy, known as "Booger", shows up. This being a Lansdale novel, you know he didn't just come to sit on the couch and drink beer. The novel basically mutates into a Hap and Leonard story, minus the humor, and much more horrific. And it will definitely have you turning the pages, but Lansdale leaves credibility behind early in the story and just seems to be trying to achieve as much shock effect as he can. And he definitely succeeds in the gore and grue department. As a substitute for Hap and Leonard's humor, he instead has the protagonist and the older woman who runs the newspaper trade clever vulgarisms back and forth in lieu of actual speech. In fact, few people in this novel behave like real people--even real people in Texas.Lansdale is having a lot of fun, and you may have some fun yourself as one unbelievable chapter after another rolls past, but when I finished the book, I regretted that it lacked the depth of Lansdale's better work, such as Lost Echoes or The Bottoms. Slow down, Joe!
    • 4/5
      Well, another great read by Joe Lansdale. It doesn't really matter what genre he is writing, you will always get great, interesting characters and a plotline that steadily builds ever more violent, disturbing and laced with dark humor.