Narrated by Tanya Eby
Linda Howard is back with Troublemaker, another romantic suspense complete with paramilitary alpha hero on the run and small-town police chief heroine guarding her heart. After Morgan Yancy is shot in front of his home while off-duty, his boss sets up a trap for the killers by asking his stepsister in West Virginia to take care of him while he recuperates. It’s not just a cover story – Morgan had open heart surgery and coded twice in surgery, so he is a shadow of his former badass self when he arrives at Isabeau “Bo” Maran’s home. Although he uses a fake surname, he isn’t much hidden, with the hope the bad guys will trip the alarms set on his whereabouts.
Bo has lived a quiet life in West Virginia with her Golden Retriever Tricks, taking a part time job as Police Chief – which in this small town is a clerk position, doing the endless bureaucratic paperwork. She keeps her distance from this attractive stranger who is obviously in need of a lot of rehabilitation. He can’t even climb the stairs to the second floor for the first few weeks, but once he starts to regain his strength, he’s a force to be reckoned with.
I expected LH romantic suspense to be, well, maybe a little more suspenseful. The bulk of the story is just pure romance – the hero and heroine learning about each other, feeling attraction and acting on it. Bo is a strong female role model, too, and I appreciated there were no misunderstandings or games between the two. And Tricks the Golden is practically a main protagonist – I found it pretty amusing and entertaining, but reviews over at Amazon are mixed on the dog’s role. This is really a small town romance – being in West Virginia, it also needed a feud so there’s the rich and out-of-control family, with a domestic spat resulting in a brawl at the local bakery. The whodunit nature of the story bookends it – at the beginning we get the lead up to Morgan’s shooting, then the middle part is primarily healing and loving, and finally the suspense comes into play. It wasn’t as wild a ride as Brockmann’s Troubleshooters, or even as some of LH’s earlier works. I wasn’t really disappointed, but I admit I spent a lot of time anticipating the suspense at every turn… and nothing happened for a while, so there was a sort of let down. Meanwhile, though, LH is at the top of her game in pure romance – her characters are fully fleshed out, and the attraction is sizzling.
At the beginning, I was also feeling a little let down by the narration. Tanya Eby is a good, solid romance narrator, and I had high expectations for this experience. The opening of the book is from Morgan’s alpha male POV (in 3rd person), and this is while it still has the feel of suspense. Eby did not deliver – while I could “hear” LH’s alpha-male in the words, Eby was delivering a small town romance, with her normal Midwestern speech patterns, as if she were reading Robyn Carr or Debbie Macomber. I was taken aback – this needed some urgency, maybe even a male narrator, especially since so much of it was from Morgan’s POV which LH writes so well. It wasn’t a bad narration – Eby’s pacing is good, for small town romance, just not for suspense. Her male voices are suitably placed in her voice, differentiated from the women. She created separate personalities for every character – even Tricks. I just didn’t want to hear alpha-male-romantic-suspense read this way. By the end, however, as it became more clear to me that the suspense wasn’t taking just a back seat, it stayed home and took a nap, Eby’s narration began to sound better to me. However, I wish I’d read it first to get the story in my head before hearing the audio.
This is a qualified recommendation – I did not find it “riveting and suspenseful” as one reviewer said – the suspense for me was wondering when the bad guys were going to show up. I enjoyed the main characters and their love story, however, and found it well written and enjoyable for pure romance.
[section label=’Audiobook Information’ anchor=’Audiobook Information’]
Melinda
AUDIOBOOK INFORMATION
TITLE: Troublemaker
AUTHOR: Linda Howard
NARRATED BY: Tanya Eby
GENRE: Romantic Suspense
STEAM FACTOR: Glad I had my earbuds in
REVIEWER: Melinda [button type=’link’ link=’http://www.amazon.com/dp/B01COR1B36/?tag=audiogalsnet-20′ size=’btn-lg’ variation=’btn-default’ target=’blank’]Buy Troublemaker by Linda Howard on Amazon[/button] [section label=’Excerpt’ anchor=’Excerpt’]EXCERPT:
