Shift

In this alternate history, author Tim Kring takes one of the most pivotal moments in American history, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and weaves in a backdrop of clandestine LSD and mind-control experiments. The danger of a book like SHIFT is taking the real events so far from reality that they no longer seem plausible. Kring, creator of TV's "Heroes," manages that balancing act nicely. Narrator Robert Forster pulls the whole story together with a tough, slightly New Yorkish accent. He keeps up the frantic pace, helping listeners track a large cast of characters, many of whom have code names. His commanding performance makes this audiobook impossible to turn off. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

July 5, 2010
At the start of this unsuspenseful alternative history thriller from TV screenwriter and producer Kring (Heroes) and Peck (Body Surfing), 1,963 people see an apparition of an oversized flaming boy in the Dallas sky at 11:22 a.m. on December 30, 2012. These numbers correspond to the year, month, and day of President Kennedy's assassination. Flashback to Cambridge, Mass., in October 1963: an attractive woman in the pay of the CIA seduces Harvard grad student Chandler Forrestal, a nephew of Truman's defense secretary, so she can slip him some LSD. The Company believes the drug allows those who take it to access a secret part of the brain known as the Gate of Orpheus. The authors score points for originality in mixing LSD with the events and usual suspects, including the Mafia and J. Edgar Hoover, leading up to Dealey Plaza and the fatal day, but their implausible hidden history of how the world works never coheres.