Pest Control by Bill Fitzhugh (Audiobook Review)

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Title: Pest Control
Author: Bill Fitzhugh
Narrator: Colby Elliott
Publisher: Last Word Audio
Duration: 7 hours, 11 minutes
Copyright: 2010
Genres: satire, intrigue
Filed in: Audiobook Reviews
Review copy provided by Last Word Audio.

PUBLISHER’S SUMMARY: Bob Dillon is a down-on-his-luck exterminator from Queens who just wants to make a killing with his radical new environmentally friendly pest elimination technique, involving his hybrid assassin bugs (a very real group of insects). But when Bob decides to advertise, his flyer falls into the hands of a European murder-for-hire broker who mistakes Bob for a professional assassin. Before he knows it, Bob's "competition" targets him for extermination, sending him running for his life from a motley collection of the world's deadliest and most outrageously eccentric contract killers.
©1997 HarperCollins (P)2010 Last Word Audio

MY TAKE ON IT: Bob Dillon is a great character and you just can’t help but empathyze with him. He’s like a cross between Homer Simpson and Mister Magoo. On the Homer Simpson side, you have a man who tries and tries to be a good husband and father, but things just never seem to go his way. On the Mister Magoo side, he is a man who sort of blunders along, without ever realizing that there are high-priced hit men trying to kill him, and government agencies trying to hire him.
When someone tries to hire Bob as an assassin, having completely misunderstood his exterminator-for-hire flyers, Bob is never quite able to convince them that he only kills bugs. Then the man Bob was hired to kill goes and drives his car off a mountain road, making it look like Bob has completed the hit. In another scene, Bob is on the verge of proving that his assassin bugs really work, and someone blows up the building in an attempt to kill him, but only succeeds in destroying the evidence of Bob’s success. Through a whole series of similar Three’s Company-ish scenarios, Bob’s name ends up at the top of a list of the best assassins in the world.
“Pest Control” is just one hilarious misunderstanding after another, and Bill Fitzhugh plays it out perfectly. He is funny and witty and has a real knack for metaphors and similes. In one scene, Bob’s wife is reading some of the old love letters he wrote while they were dating. He is describing one of his favorite bugs when he says, “it’s dark metallic blue and dangerous, like your eyes.” I think Fitzhugh is a great writer and I’m a little surprised that I’ve never heard of him. I’ll be on the lookout for his name from now on.

NARRATOR: “Pest Control” is the second Colby Elliott narration that I’ve heard, and I like him more all the time. The first one was a non-fiction audiobook with little dialogue, and not much room for interpretation. “Pest Control” was a better forum for Elliott. There were some foreign characters to read, and Elliott did convincing French and British accents, and he read with a good deal of enthusiasm when the story called for it.

FINAL WORD: I would recommend “Pest Control” to just about anyone. I got several good chuckles out of it myself. It’s just good, clean fun.

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If you like this audiobook review, you can purchase the audiobook here:
Get “Pest Control” by Bill Fitzhugh (Unabridged Audiobook) from Last Word Audio.

This audiobook review is based on the unabridged audiobook.
Audiobook review by Steven Brandt
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