Narrated by Greg Tremblay
I listened to Fire and Flint, the first book in Andrew Grey’s series featuring the sheriff’s deputies in Carlisle, PA, last year and enjoyed it sufficiently to want to listen to another book in the series. Fire and Granite is book two, and like its predecessor, it’s a fairly low-angst, low-drama listen with a tender and rather sweet romance at its centre.
Deputy Clay Brown is one of a team escorting a high-risk, dangerous criminal from prison to the courthouse when their vehicles are ambushed, and the prisoner – who by a weird quirk of fate happens to be Clay’s cousin Harper Grange – is sprung in what is clearly a well-planned operation. Clay is frustrated at being on the other end of the investigation rather than being out there looking for the escapee, so he’s not too pleased when he’s handed a different assignment. Judge Andrew Phillips was responsible for putting Grange behind bars, and less than an hour after the ambush, received a phone call threatening his life. Clay is assigned as his protection detail while Grange is at large – but as he doesn’t exactly get along with “Judge Moody and Superior” or like him very much, it’s going to be a difficult few days.
Judge Phillips is tough, fair and by the book; he doesn’t suffer fools, he doesn’t tolerate theatrics in his courtroom, he runs things with an iron hand and likes things just so – so the last thing he wants is round-the-clock protection and someone telling him what to do, where to go and basically interfering in his well-ordered life. As if it’s not bad enough to be getting death threats from a whack-job criminal, he’s also got to put up with “impatient control freak” Deputy Clay Brown 24/7… and make sure he keeps a tight lid on the powerful pull of attraction he feels towards him.
It’s not surprising that two such strong personalities should clash, and it’s not long before the pair are butting heads over the fact that Andrew doesn’t like feeling so out of control. But he soon has to concede that Clay knows what he’s doing – and agrees not to take any unnecessary risks. Andrew is reluctantly impressed when Clay takes his acquiescence without gloating over it – and is more than a little surprised when the deputy suggests that it would make more sense for Andrew to stay at his house for the next few days rather than the other way around.
After this, both men start to drop their guards around each other, and Andrew has to admit to himself that Clay isn’t at all the jerk he’d originally thought him; he’s kind, down-to-earth and incredibly intuitive, offering a quiet, steady comfort that Andrew needs – and likes – very much. And Clay begins to realise that the stern judge he’d met in the courtroom is a very different man from the Andrew he’s coming to know, a man with a tender heart and a vulnerability he keeps firmly under wraps.
It’s been a couple of days since the escape, and Grange is somehow managing to stay one step ahead of the police and is no nearer to being brought in when Andrew receives news that up-ends his already turned-inside-out life. His sister is in the hospital following a suicide attempt, and is in no state to take care of her two young children. There’s absolutely no question that Andrew is going to let Duane and Auburn be put into the foster system; no matter what else is going on in his life, he’s going to look after those kids and give them some badly needed stability. Clay is impressed – and touched – at Andrew’s willingness to suddenly assume responsibility for the kids, especially in light of the problems he’s already facing, and he’s not going to let him do it alone.
I admit that when I read the synopsis for Fire and Granite, I thought the storyline sounded a little similar to the previous book, which also involved a judge and a protagonist with young children. Fortunately, however, those similarities are mostly superficial and this story takes a very different direction. One of the criticisms I had of Fire and Flint was that the suspense plotline running in the background was too easily wrapped up; here, however, the fact that Andrew is being threatened means that storyline is more prominent – not overly so, but present enough that the danger Andrew and Clay are facing is never far away from the mind of the listener while the guys are falling in love and then finding their feet as de facto parents to two young children.
The chemistry between Clay and Andrew is undeniable, but their romance progresses very quickly; they’re exchanging ILYs after just a matter of days, so we’re in insta-love-land here. With that said, however, they’re so cute together and so supportive of each other that I could just about believe they’d fallen for each other in so short a time (I also suspect that the way the emotion between the pair is so strongly conveyed by Greg Tremblay helped to convince me!). There were, however, a couple of plot points I found harder to accept. Even though he hardly knew his cousin, would Clay have been allowed anywhere near a case involving a family member? And when we discover the deeper reasons behind Grange’s vendetta against Andrew, I had to ask myself if Andrew had acted correctly in presiding at his trial. I get that this is fiction, but both those things seemed a little tenuous.
So yes, there are a few fault-lines in the story, but there are none whatsoever in the narration, which will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever listened to Greg Tremblay. I will almost always opt to listen to a book rather than read it if he’s narrating, because of the extra dimension he brings to what’s on the page. He imbues everything he narrates with a degree of realism that is achieved by few other performers; his delivery is always perfectly paced, characters are well-differentiated and characterised, and the emotions felt by those characters feel genuine and true to life. All those things are true of his performance here; the growing warmth and affection between Andrew and Clay is beautifully portrayed and I have to give a shout-out to his excellent renditions of Auburn and Duane, which are sufficiently childlike to be convincing without resorting to caricature.
An enjoyable addition to the Carlisle Deputies series, Fire and Granite is an undemanding though engaging romance with a dash of suspense, all wrapped up in another superb performance from Greg Tremblay.
Caz
Buy Fire and Granite by Andrew Grey on Amazon
