Scavenger: A Mystery

Christopher Chambers

Aug 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Ron Butler

About this audiobook

Christopher Chambers brings a twenty-first-century take on hardboiled noir tales in Scavenger, a gripping thriller underscored by themes of race, homelessness, hustling, and the savagery-and salvation-of the human psyche. The novel centers on Dickie Cornish, a Black streetwise survivor living in a homeless camp near DC's Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. Framed for the murder of two of his closest friends and facing life in prison, Dickie crosses paths with wealthy ex-Homeland Security Secretary, Jamie Bracht. Bracht offers him a chance at a new life if Dickie can navigate an underground world to uncover a prize Bracht will stop at nothing to acquire. As Dickie searches, Scavenger tracks its way through an underground population of Washington, DC, where hustlers, drug addicts, homeless, and undocumented immigrants jostle for crumbs while trying to survive. Chambers paints a portrait of DC from the ground up, with back-alley streetscapes, gentrification clashes, and unexpected encounters between politicians and bottom-rung natives-all set against a soundscape of patois, street Spanish, and DC slang. A hopeless amateur detective at first, Dickie quickly learns the ropes of being a sleuth in a cat-and-mouse game of greed, deceit, double-crossing, and murder.

About the author

Christopher Chambers is a professor of media studies and a novelist. His novels include A Prayer for Deliverance and Sympathy for the Devil, the graphic anthology (with Gary Phillips) The Darker Mask, and PEN/Malamud-nominated story, "Leviathan."

Ron Butler is a Los Angeles-based actor and voice artist with over a hundred film and television credits (playing everything from brooding doctors to screwball hipsters). Ron works regularly as a commercial and animation voice-over artist and has voiced a wide variety of audiobooks.