Did You Miss Me? by Karen Rose

Did You Miss MeNarrated by Marguerite Gavin

Daphne Montgomery is an Assistant State’s Attorney working with Grayson Smith (hero of No One Left to Tell). Joseph Carter is Grayson’s brother in all but blood and, since he first met Daphne some nine months earlier, he has had the hots for her. Under the impression that she is dating someone else, he has kept his distance and merely pines. Daphne, for her part, feels the same way but cannot understand why Joseph hasn’t made a move (and of course, she couldn’t possibly make one of her own).

Daphne’s son (she got pregnant at age 15), Ford (age 20), is kidnapped and this brings Daphne and Joseph into close proximity which cues the romantic tension to escalate, misunderstandings to be resolved, crimes to be solved, and happy endings (of all kinds) to be had.

The main focus of Did You Miss Me?is the suspense plot and it is convoluted. Suffice to say that someone is out to cause trouble for Daphne and he’s got incredibly detailed and elaborate plans in this regard. Frankly, it was baffling sometimes. Some of the police’s investigatory leaps felt more like they had read the villain’s POV rather than being something easily (or even cleverly) deduced from the facts at hand.

The audiobook is over 20 hours long and by the 10 hour mark, only 24 hours have passed. It is an indicator the level of detail, convolution, and the large cast.

It is also not for the faint of heart; most of the characters are put through the wringer times a thousand – they had sad story after sad story in their history.  It became wearing.

Ms. Rose has a habit of mixing internal character thoughts within the narrative.  So, on the page it might look like:

Joseph looked at her then, the rage in his eyes now mixed with surprise and regret.

But regret for what? Being angry? Being with me?

She wished she could ask him.

It’s something I can skim over in print but it’s distracting for me in audio, this jumping about from third person to first. It isn’t helped by the overly melodramatic narration from Ms. Gavin. I can’t honestly say whether I would find the writing melodramatic on its own – whether it’s purely the narration or the combination of the two.  But I did find myself rolling my eyes a lot. As a consequence of the melodrama and the emo naval gazing, I didn’t connect well with any of the characters, particularly the romantic leads – Daphne and Joseph.

Ms. Gavin has a number of character voices and does convincing male tones but I think some of them were very hard on her voice and this led to some incidents of cracking and breaking which had the effect of adding inappropriate emotion and tension to some scenes. There were also vocal full stops which did not match the text. That is to say, that the sentence hadn’t finished yet but it sounded like it had. Except it. Hadn’t. Somewhat alarmingly, there was also some weirdness toward the end of the book. A sentence would start and end in Joseph’s POV but then (and it did sound like it was dubbed later) Daphne’s voice would do the middle bit. The dubbed sections were louder and very jolting.

Some of my favorite romantic suspense books have been written by Karen Rose (Have You Seen Her?, Die for Me), but unfortunately, this one didn’t do it for me and I don’t think this narrator does either.

Kaetrin


Narration:  C

Book Content:  C

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Graphic

Genre:  Romantic Suspense

Publisher:  Blackstone Audio

 

Did You Miss Me was provided to AudioGals for review by Blackstone Audio.

3 thoughts on “Did You Miss Me? by Karen Rose

  1. This worries me. I’ve really enjoyed a lot of Rose’s books. I was looking forward to this one, but I think I’ll let it sit for a while now. It’s sad when authors we like disappoint us.

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