The Killers

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Two men in overcoats walk into a lunchroom in a small Illinois town and order dinner an hour before the kitchen serves it. They are not hungry. They tie up the cook and the boy behind the counter, and they wait.

The man they have come for is Ole Andreson, a Swedish ex-prizefighter who eats there most evenings. Tonight he does not come. The two men leave as calmly as they arrived.

Young Nick Adams runs across town to warn him, and finds him lying fully dressed on a rooming-house bed, facing the wall. Andreson knows. He has known for some time. He is not going to run, or call the police, or explain what he did. There is nothing more to say about it.

A landmark of modern American fiction, told almost entirely in dialogue, in which everything that matters happens in the silences.