I loved listening to this audiobook. I was laughing so hard I had tears coming from eyes. I just loved the story.

This takes you on a ride with a cast of characters that you will definitely going to fall in love with as i sure did. The characters are so well developed and described you will feel like you know them and all their personality's.

Thank you @johnbrynebarry @netgalley for allowing me to listen to this @audiobook.

As someone who once lived on the Sausalito Waterfront, when I noticed this title on Victory Editing's Instagram feed (my own mystery is also on their feed), I knew I had to read this! The advance reader edition available to me free on NetGalley was the double-narrator audio version.

Pirates of Sausalito is a murder mystery based on real but non-murderous events, so I was very curious to see what the author did with his material. I could easily imagine the houseboat community as a perfect and fascinating setting for mystery fiction, as for decades the Waterfront was home to a remarkable mix of creative figures, maritime workers, drifters, and various generations of the counterculture, and tensions often ran high with the city government and developers.

Pirates of Sausalito is a lively tale of houseboat-dwellers versus developer, and was originally written as a play. The community theater roots are clear in its broadly sketched characters and rapid action, and I can imagine that the play was good fun to watch--perhaps similar in style to San Francisco's famous Mime Troupe performances (which aren't in mime). The audiobook carries through in that same theatrical spirit, with one male and one female narrator handling the different male and female voices, plus zany, even comedic, choices of music and sound effects to announce the beginning of each chapter. Both narrators do a skillful job, in a style more familiar from radio drama than the world of audiobooks.

The author sandwiches the novel between a bit of historical background (how did Sausalito come to have a large houseboat community?) and an afterword providing more specifics of the actual Houseboat Wars that clarify just what is fanciful and what is factual. Incidentally, something not noted in the afterword was the author's decision to move events that happened at Galilee Harbor in 1981 back to 1979 in order to include a subplot around the White Night riots that followed the Dan White manslaughter verdict (this worked, since Galilee isn't named in the mystery, but rather the fictional Aquarius).

In sum, the book is an unusual mix of serious social issues--low-income housing and coastal development--and comedy. If you go into it expecting deep characterization or grim tension, you'll be disappointed, but if you'd enjoy a fun diversion that's based in real history, this is likely to please. I enjoyed it.