Stone Cold Cowboy by Jennifer Ryan 

Narrated by Coleen Marlo

Western romance lovers looking for a true cowboy who is particularly adept at saving the damsel in distress, will enjoy the wholesome goodness of the admirable hero in Stone Cold Cowboy. For the most part, the suspense angle of the plot is pretty predictable, but I did enjoy listening to the way that the caring and honorable, loyal hero took care of his “gal.” He’s the kind of cowboy that a western heroine should lasso in and never let get away.

Please note though that while the hero is top-notch, and a sweet kind gentleman, there is some rather descriptive physical abuse of the heroine (the abuse the hero saves the heroine from) that is a little tough to listen to. So this book may not be for all listeners.

Sadie Higgins is barely keeping her family together. She’s been trying to get her brother to walk on the right side of the law since they were kids, and his antics keep getting worse and worse. As if that wasn’t bad enough, her father is dying and she has no help from her brother or anyone else to take care of him. As you can imagine, with all this going on, poor Sadie has no time for her personal life much less to notice a man who has had his eye on her for quite some time.

Someone is stealing cattle from Rory Kendrick, and he’s determined to track them down. What he never could of expected was to find poor Sadie Higgins, beaten and within a hairs breadth of the end of her life, tied up to the latest crime scene. The police don’t know what to make of it, but Rory knows in his heart that there is no way that Sadie could possibly have been involved with the theft. Her good for nothing brother on the other hand, he’s determined to ferret out and question.

When Sadie finally wakes up in the hospital, she’s equal parts determined to save her brother from any blame and get back to work to earn enough money to pay the bills. But when Rory fears for her safety and appoints himself to be her guardian, Sadie learns what it’s like to have somebody watch after her for once in her life. But can there possibly be a HEA in their future when Rory’s misfortune is tied to Sadie’s family and there is still a violent madman on the run ready to teach Sadie a lesson?

This was my first experience with Coleen Marlo as narrator and I was definitely impressed. Ms. Marlo has a strong, pleasant voice and imbued each character with the requisite southern accent. Additionally, Ms. Marlo’s pacing of the story was timed right to deliver the correct mood of the scene and to make it effortless to follow the story.

Ms. Marlo was also able to produce sufficiently differentiated voices to make it easy to pick out the speaker in dialogue scenes. Moreover, between characters of the same gender, Ms. Marlo was able to vary her intonation slightly (in accordance with the personality traits of the individual character) to give you that feeling that you were actually listening to the character speak.

All in all, Stone Cold Cowboy is a feel good romance that will leave listeners assured there are definitely some true gentleman, cowboys left in the world. Lovers of audiobooks will be especially pleased to know that the narration by Ms. Marlo is great and definitely makes this title a natural choice to experience in audio format.

BJ

Narration: B+

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Domestic Violence

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Harper Audio

Stone Cold Cowboy was provided to AudioGals by Harper Audio for a review.