Viking Raid

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the concept at first—*ship financing as thriller fodder?*—but *Viking Raid* won me over by committing *hard* to its weird genius. The story picks up after *The Shipping Man*, but you don’t need prior knowledge to get hooked. McCleery drops you into a world where the real pirates wear tailored suits and carry briefcases full of default swaps, not cutlasses. The Virtual Voice narrator is an acquired taste: its flat, AI-generated delivery initially feels jarring during dialogue-heavy scenes, but by hour three, it starts to *work*. The monotone becomes a darkly funny contrast to the chaos—like listening to a robot recount a bar brawl. The plot’s strongest when it leans into its absurdity. A highlight? A tense negotiation over a distressed vessel’s salvage rights that devolves into a literal knife fight in a Singapore hotel. Yet the book stumbles slightly in its midsection, where McCleery’s love for maritime minutiae (seriously, there’s a *very* detailed explanation of flag-state regulations) risks losing casual listeners. And while the Virtual Voice handles exposition well, its lack of inflection during climactic moments occasionally flattens the tension. Still, the payoff—a heist involving a ghost ship and a rogue commodities trader—is worth the occasional slog. If you’ve ever wondered what *Margin Call* would look like with more arson and Viking metaphors, this is your audiobook. **Critiques to note:** The female characters feel underdeveloped (one is literally described as ‘the ice queen lawyer’—*really*?), and the Virtual Voice’s pronunciation of Norwegian names is… optimistic. But for fans of niche thrillers that educate as they entertain, *Viking Raid* delivers a bracingly original ride.