Cut & Run by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux

Narrated by Sawyer Allerde

A Vintage Review – audiobook released in 2010, review from 2018

I’m on a bit of an m/m romantic suspense kick at the moment, so this first book in the Cut & Run series seemed like a good fit. There are nine books in all – the first four co-written by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux, and the last five by Abigail Roux solo when Ms. Urban decided to stop writing. Cut & Run was originally published in 2008 (with the audio following in 2010) and I suspect it was a bit of a trailblazer in the genre – it certainly seems that way from reading reviews and seeing how many people loved the series and the central characters.

The whole series is available in audio with several different narrators; here it’s Sawyer Allerde (the others are Sean Crisden and J.F. Harding) who I’ve listened to once before, and he does a decent job overall, in spite of some pacing issues and pretty poor female voices (luckily, there aren’t too many women in the book so it’s not too great a problem.)

We’ve got a traditional “odd couple” pairing in FBI agents Ty Grady and Zane Garrett – or so it seems at first. Ty is the crazy maverick who doesn’t play well with others; Zane is the tidy, detail oriented one who plays by the book, but as the story progresses and we learn the reasons for Zane’s straight-laced-ness, it seems the two men have more in common than we – and they – at first realised.

A former recon marine, Ty has just come off an operation that went sideways, while Zane has worked for the past couple of years in financial and cyber-crimes after being pulled out of deep cover. They’re paired up to investigate a series of killings that have become known as the Tri-State murders which have stumped all the investigators assigned to date. The – so far – eight victims appear to have nothing in common; not gender, race, age, soclai status or any of the things that might normally be exhibited in a case of serial killings – although the last two victims were the two FBI agents most recently assigned to the case. The official line is that Ty and Zane are being sent to help the local field office with their investigation – in reality, they’re being sent because it’s believed that the murderer is someone on the inside, and they’re to pursue their own enquiries while appearing to be co-operating with the New York team.

Neither Ty nor Zane is wild about their new partnership and immediately start butting heads – which is just as well, because their cover is to act as though they’re a couple of inept agents who couldn’t unearth the truth about a paper bag, something their mutual animosity won’t make it difficult to believe.

Cut & Run is a fairly long audiobook, coming in at just under fourteen hours, and while it held my interest for the most part, there were times where the pacing lagged, and the story could have done with a bit of judicious editing. The snarky banter between Ty and Zane is a highlight (although sometimes, I had to remind myself they were thirty-four and forty-two and not twelve!), and the authors do a great job with their creations; two stubborn, pig-headed alpha males who can’t say what they mean and for whom revealing anything vaguely personal is worse than pulling teeth. There’s a fair bit of the hurt/comfort trope here, and the suspense plot has some really tense moments, but I can’t deny that it seemed like three-quarters of the story was Ty and Zane holed up in a hotel room, eating, sleeping and snarking at each other, or that there were some fairly big inconsistencies that took me out of the story. Such as – how did the bad guy manage to steal a New York cab with illegally tinted-windows? Why do two guys with such big trust issues immediately trust someone they’ve never met before to the extent they do?

I didn’t mind the complete over-the-top-ness of the plot – things going “boom!”, car chases, fights – there’s much to be said for well-done hokum, although I have to say that it felt at times as though there was a competition going on for which of the men could sustain the most critical injuries! The biggest issue with the book itself, however, is the constant head-hopping and PoV switches, which sometimes happen from one paragraph to the next, and sometimes even within a paragraph, so that it can be difficult to keep track of who is saying and thinking what. Fortunately, Sawyer Allerde provides distinct character voices for Ty and Zane, which may have made that a bit less of an issue for me, but it’s still very noticeable and is sometimes very jarring, as is the overuse of adverbs; rarely does anyone just “say” anything – they say it “worriedly” (a lot) or “slowly” or “sleepily”… which became irritating quite quickly ;)

I tend to prefer romantic suspense in which there’s a fairly even balance between the two plot elements, but that isn’t really the case here. Usually, I’m saying the romance is relegated to the back seat, but here, it’s the opposite, and the suspense plot is, well, ‘suspended’ for long periods for the aforementioned eating, sleeping and snarking. And sex, when Ty and Zane finally stop dancing around each other and get down to business! Again – I’m not complaining too much because Ty and Zane are such engaging characters, but the suspense plot does get overshadowed – which is a shame, because it’s intriguing – and the identity of the killer was fairly easy to work out. Which had me asking that if I could work it out, given I knew only what Ty and Zane knew – why didn’t THEY work it out earlier?

But even with all those criticisms, I still enjoyed the story which, I suspect, was mostly due to the two central characters, who are deeply flawed, extremely charismatic and very strongly written. As I said above, Sawyer Allerde differentiates clearly between the two principals, giving Ty a slightly husky note which makes it easy to distinguish his speech from Zane’s. There aren’t many secondary characters in the book; the principal one is Ty and Zane’s boss, Mr. Burns, whose gruff, somewhat flabby tone conjures up the picture of a rather jowly individual, and the young FBI agent, Tim Henniger, whose voice is pitched slightly higher than the others. There are three or four female speaking roles – with only a small number of lines each – which is just as well, because Mr. Allerde’s female voices leave much to be desired; he doesn’t pitch them at a range only dogs can hear, but he does resort to falsetto and it just sounds, well… silly. His pacing is sometimes a little fast, although he doesn’t mangle or trip over words and he isn’t unintelligible; I just felt it was somewhat rushed, and while for the most part this wasn’t a huge problem, it did detract in the love scenes, which I found lacking in emotion and a little too matter-of-fact.

BUT. When all’s said and done, I listened for nearly fourteen hours without wanting to rip out my earphones and stomp on them, and enjoyed the listen enough that I’m planning to pick up the next book, Sticks & Stones. I suppose it just goes to show that something can be both imperfect and entertaining. Cut & Run gets a qualified recommendation.

Caz