Hard As It Gets by Laura Kaye

Narrated by Seraphine Valentine

I’ve been meaning to try the Hard Ink series by Laura Kaye for ages now. In fact, I think I own most of the ebooks in the series already – I just haven’t got to them yet. My TBL is shorter than my TBR so I thought there was a better chance of finally making a start if I tried the audio version. Hard As It Gets is the first; even though I came out in 2013, I like to start at the beginning. Given there is an overarching story to the series, that was probably a good decision. But I think, in hindsight, I’d have been better off with the ebook.

The story has all the ingredients I usually like so I’m struggling to put my finger on exactly what caused me to be so bored by it. But I was. Bored. Bored. Bored. It took me a week and a half to get through a 12-hour audiobook because I kept preferring silence to actually listening to it. Normally, I’ve always got my earbuds in.

Nick Rixey is former Special Forces and now works as a process server when he’s not moonlighting at Hard Ink, his brother’s tattoo shop. Nick and his squad were ambushed in Afghanistan and six of them died – plus, the commanding officer, Colonel Frank Merritt. When the (all wounded) survivors were well enough to start asking questions about what went down, they faced an impenetrable wall. No way Frank Merritt was dirty – even though evidence points to the contrary. Suddenly, the squad’s service records are doctored so they look like losers and misfits and they are offered a choice: serve time in a military prison for someone else’s crime or accept a dishonourable discharge and sign non-disclosure agreements about the events in Afghanistan and afterwards. The remaining guys took the deal and went their separate ways. Now, 10 months later, Becca Merritt, Frank’s daughter, turns up on Nick’s doorstep after she receives a cryptic message from her missing brother, Charlie.

It seems Charlie has stumbled across evidence of their father’s corruption and has been abducted because of it. Becca implores Nick to help and before they know it, in true Blues Brothers fashion, Nick is getting the team back together to stage a rescue.

What appears to be the series arc of proving the squad’s innocence is not done by the end of Hard As It Gets, but the subplot about what happened to Charlie and, of course, Becca and Nick falling in love, are.

It should have been a winner. Really it should have. A whole bunch of hot guy wounded warriors, a pressing need (finding Charlie), danger (finding Charlie) and a love affair complicated by the fact that Nick hates Becca’s dad (whom she adored). What’s not to like?

Well, a couple of things actually. There was a lot of action in the book – the whole thing takes less than a week from start to finish. But sometimes I felt those days were passing in real time. There was a lot of navel gazing and minutiae which I think I would have skimmed in print. I can’t do that on audio.

Also, the narration wasn’t great. Most of the actual speaking was okay and the accents and pitches etc were done well enough. I had no trouble working out who was speaking and I could suspend my disbelief sufficiently to believe the voices were male when Nick and his team were speaking. But there were odd and lengthy pauses which baffled me. In the middle of a conversation there’d be a long gap and then the story would resume as if nothing had happened. When I say “long gap” I’m only talking a few seconds, but in the context of an audiobook, it’s jarring. That’s the kind of gap one might expect between chapters – not between sentences. These gaps would appear randomly (and often) throughout the listen, sometimes in mid-conversation, sometimes in the midst of a character’s thought process. It was, frankly, irritating.

I suppose the first book in a series such as this has a lot of set up to do and that explains part of my issue with the story. It is a hard sell for me to accept a full HEA when the action takes less than a week and that didn’t help. Add to that, the dragging pauses in the narration, well, what should have been an action-packed romantic suspense was only occasionally gripping and unfortunately, fairly often, boring.

Kaetrin

Narration: C-

Book Content: C

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Fighting, some torture (off page)

Genre: Romantic Suspense

Publisher: Harper Audio

Hard As It Gets was provided to AudioGals by Harper Audio for a review.