Intergalactic Exterminators, Inc

Loaded with gunslinging action, Bishop’s sci-fi debut fires a little off-center when it comes to character writing and ingenuity. Let’s just say that listeners won’t need a sniper scope to spot the ending. When Russ unwittingly lures a monstrous alien to small-town Louisiana with a stone found in his late grandfather’s curiosity collection, he gets the chance to quit his aimless drifting and shoot for the stars (literally). Complicating matters are the android enforcers who’ll wipe his memory of being rescued by space exterminators if he doesn’t sign a contract for employment in alien pest control. Russ hates contracts. And then, there is the busty electrical engineer to whom he showed the stone, Nina, who filches it out from under him. Reading Russ’s and Nina’s chapters respectively, Scott Brick and Suzanne Freeman do all they can to uplift the text into an adventure worth the time, chewing gamely on lines like, “I shouldn’t have corrected you. I am a scientist, but I’m also being a snob,” and “Shoot it in the butthole,” but whether they succeed depends largely on the listener.