Alone by Kendra Elliot

AloneNarrated by Tanya Eby

I have a love/hate relationship with romantic suspense. I want to love it more than I do of late. It’s difficult to get the balance right between relationship and suspense plot and, if the characters make stupid decisions in furtherance of the plot (or have sex while being shot at for example), then I get grumpy. When I saw the blurb for Alone I was hopeful – I’m always on the lookout for good romantic suspense – and that the narrator was Tanya Eby was another plus. She is one of my favourite narrators but I’d have to say this isn’t her best performance. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but I noticed some errors and the similarities in the male character voices were more obvious than usual.

Victoria Peres is a forensic anthropologist (think TV’s Bones). She shares other similarities with the TV character in that she’s introverted and prefers logic over emotion but she’s not a clone of the TV character. Her boss, the Medical Examiner for Portland, is about to retire and the recruitment process has delivered two potential candidates (interestingly, the other candidate was never mentioned again and never named, or at least, not that I heard). When the bodies of six young girls are found (five of the girls dead and one barely alive) the ME invites Candidate #1, Seth Rutledge to the scene and thence on a “working interview”. I don’t know if that really happens in the US but I was prepared to go with it for the sake of the story.

Seth and “Tori” (he’s the only one who calls her that) were in love back in college but when his ex-girlfriend named him as the father of her baby, he broke it off and married the mother of his child so as to be a hands-on parent (it’s complicated but explained well in the book). Seth and Tori never got over their feelings however and when he turns up in Portland, she is shocked and worried about working with him.

Fortunately, both of them are now single and it is clear early on that their feelings haven’t really changed even though it’s been eighteen years since they dated and a lot of water has gone under the bridge. You have to suspend your disbelief a fair bit to accept that in the space of about a week, they go from distrust and hurt too deeply in love again. It kind of worked because of their past history but I didn’t think about it too much either – if I had, I would have realised there were enough holes to drive a truck through.

The deaths of the girls mirror an unsolved mass murder which occurred in 1968. Victoria starts work on the bones of the three unidentified girls and the police try and solve the past and current crime.

There are a large number of POV characters – this was a bit of a surprise actually. Usually you’d expect to get the heroine, hero, and maybe the villain but here, there is also the perspective of a teenage girl who is the friend of one of the victims and a police officer (who is the hero of Book 5 in the series – this is Book 4).

The story contains some bad math. Seth and Tori had last seen each other ten years ago when they had both been married – they shared a dinner as friends. But Tori has been divorced for two years and was only married for five. I know math is not my strong suit but…

The murder is not grisly and there is no sexual violence (there’s a hint of it later in the story but nothing explicit). There is a description of a fairly violent murder connected to the crime (which is why I’ve tagged the violence “graphic”) but the story is not terribly explicit in a general sense.

I usually enjoy Tanya Eby’s narration. I did so here too but there were a couple of things which bothered me. There were a large number of male characters – most of them were middle-aged men from the Midwest and they sounded exactly the same. There were a couple of male characters of Italian origin – their accent (which slipped occasionally) served to differentiate them from the others, an older man, and a teenage boy. The older characters and the boy were distinct enough but there was really no discernible difference between Seth, Mason (the policeman), and Michael (the hero of a previous book) and when they were all talking together, I was completely reliant on dialogue tags.

Can I also say that “liver” in “liver mortis” is pronounced the same way as “river” and NOT as in “diver”? It grated and I wondered why it wasn’t picked up in editing, especially as it was a repeated mistake. There were some other vocal errors in the listen – sentences ended too soon for example.

Apart from those two things, the narration was of a good standard. If I had my druthers, I’d wish for Tanya Eby to add some more male character voices to her repertoire.

The end of the story kind of snuck up on me and the denouement was fairly abrupt and somewhat anticlimactic. For the most part, the actions of the main characters made sense and Seth and Tori had good chemistry.

Tanya Eby’s characterisations were up to her usual high standard and her pacing in terms of the suspense plot was also good. Perhaps I am harder on Ms. Eby because I know how great her narrations can be.

While it wasn’t my favourite romantic suspense, it was also far from the worst I have read or listened to and I was never bored. I liked the story enough to read/listen to this author’s work again. I did feel the medical and investigation information seemed authentic and wasn’t sensationalised. While I don’t think it was Tanya Eby’s best narration ever, she remains one of my favourite narrators.

Kaetrin


Narration:  B-

Book Content:  C+

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence:  Graphic

Genre:  Romantic Suspense

Publisher:  Brilliance Audio

 

Alone was provided to AudioGals for review by Brilliance Audio.