One Dark Wish by Sharon Wray

Narrated by Kevin T. Collins and Savannah Peachwood

In the eight or nine years I’ve been reviewing books and audiobooks, I can count the number of times I’ve DNF’d a review copy on the fingers of one hand. I’ve slogged through some atrocious stories and horrific narrations to the bitter end, so I can at least feel that by being able to warn others away from such duds, the time I spent reading or listening to them wasn’t completely wasted.

So DNF-ing is a rare occurrence for me, but I had to admit defeat and give up just after the halfway mark of Sharon Wray’s One Dark Wish, the second book in her Deadly Force series. I’m not familiar with the author and haven’t read or listened to anything of hers before, but the synopsis sounded appealing.

Historian Sarah Munro is not used to being shot at, but that’s just what happens as she’s searching for the key to a centuries-old cipher. Her quest draws the attention of two deadly enemies, and one smoldering Major with an agenda of his own.

Ex-Green Beret Major Nate Walker and his men were betrayed and dishonorably discharged–and he intends to redeem their honor. To do that, he must stop Sarah, or risk losing one of his men. Caught in a deadly rivalry, Nate can’t afford to trust the one woman standing in his way. But his heart says he can’t afford not to…

The thing is, that nowhere in that synopsis does it indicate that this is one of those series where each story will make much more sense if you listen to the previous books first, so when I started listening and jumped right into the middle of a scene that felt as though it had started previously, I had to check my mp3 player to make sure I hadn’t hit play on part two instead of part one.

I hadn’t.

After listening for a while longer, I went back to the Goodreads page for book one – Every Deep Desire – to see if I could glean any more information from that. Perhaps I’d missed that this is a continuing series featuring the same characters… but no, that book has a different central couple, and skimming reviews showed that many readers had the same problems with the story there as I did with this one.

So, after over eight hours of listening to this fourteen-plus-hours-long audiobook, and still being unable to get to grips with the plot and really understand what was going on, I decided life’s just too short to keep listening to something that’s clearly never going to be anything other than one big pile of utter confusion.

To give you an idea of the reasons for my frustration, here’s a quick summary of what I think was going on:

We’ve got a unit of Green Berets who were dishonourably discharged following time spent in a PoW camp or prison after being blamed for a massacre in Afghanistan (for which they were, of course, not responsible).  They now run a gym in downtown Savannah.  The hero of this novel, Major Nate Walker was accused of being the mastermind behind the incident, and as his health had deteriorated – he still has seizures – and his memory was shot, he was sent to a mental hospital for the criminally insane.  On return to the US, he was put into a special military hospital prison somewhere outside Maine, but has been released – temporarily – for reasons I don’t recall being explained.  He’s been instructed – by a Fianna Warrior (see below) to watch over and protect Sarah Munro, but has only a few days to do so before he must return to the hospital prison.

Historian Sarah Munro lives in Savannah with her adoptive father, formerly the police chief in Boston, who has been in poor health lately, suffering seizures, terrible migranes and intermittent memory loss.  Sarah’s professional reputation took a massive hit after an unscrupulous colleague stole her research on a seventeenth century diary and had it published while it was still incomplete, thus making her something of a laughing stock.  She is still, however, determined to pursue her research into the diary, believing it to contain the key to a cipher used by pirates to give the locations of their hiding places.  Except there are people out there who don’t want her to unlock the code – who will stop at nothing to make sure it remains unbroken.

And then there’s the group of mysterious individuals known as the Fianna Knights or Warriors (I’m not sure which), highly-trained assassins who work for someone known only as “The Prince” – who bow before they strike and quote (and misquote) Shakespeare all the time.

And in addition, we have heroin smugglers, the Russian mob, arms dealers, corrupt police officers, an historical love story, pirates, the possibility that one of Nate’s own team has sold him out and Sarah’s father being forcibly committed … there were so many different characters and backstories and plot threads that it was practically impossible to unpick any of them and make sense of what was going on. Each one was very interesting – who framed Nate’s team and why? Why ruin Sarah’s professional reputation? Who wanted to get her father out of the way? What’s the link between his seizures and memory loss and Nate’s? Why does the Prince not want the pirate cipher solved? Who is trying to pressure Sarah into solving it and why? Wanting to understand the story and then get answers to all those questions is what kept me listening for more than eight hours, but after a while my anticipation morphed into disappointment and an ever encroaching feeling that I was never going to get to the bottom of things. Plus, there are about ten members of Nate’s team (or it seemed that way!), and if they’re all going to get their own stories while these plotlines continue…? Yeah, no. I just don’t have the stamina or patience to wait that long to find out what the hell was going on. 

Basically, while there are a lot of good ideas here – too many for one book, though – the author fails spectacularly in the execution. And as for the romance? Well, that’s a casualty, too. Nate and Sarah obviously know each other before the book opens and they kiss in the prologue; after that they keep bumping into each other (Sarah doesn’t know that Nate is keeping an eye on her) and we’re told about their mutual attraction, but there is zero chemistry between them and the whole thing is flatter than the flattest of pancakes. The sex scene in the middle (there might be more, but I didn’t manage to get that far!) is clumsily written and of course, neither of them has ever had such amazing sex before. *eyeroll*

Poor Savanna Peachwood and Kevin T. Collins really drew a short straw with this one, but I suppose they at least got paid for their work. If I was confused, hearing the whole text, I can only imagine how confusing it must have been for them reading only part of the story! Just as it can be difficult to make a judgment about a story when it’s poorly narrated, so is it hard to do in reverse; the story was so difficult to follow that after a few hours, I realised I was sort of going through the motions and not listening to the voices so much as I was trying to listen to the words in an attempt to make sense of it all! (It’s weird how the brain can divorce one part of the listening process from the others!)

I enjoyed listening to Savannah Peachwood fairly recently in Avery Flynn’s Tomboy and her performance here is equally strong; well-paced, well-characterised and differentiated – her male voices are convincing and she’s really good at injecting the right degree of emotion and expression into her voice. Kevin T. Collins is new-to-me and also does a more than decent job, although his pacing is occasionally on the slow side and sometimes, he over-emphasises words or phrases so they sound cheesy rather than convinced or convincing.

But neither of them really stood a chance against the text, which is a lumbering juggernaut of WTF?

Caz

Editor’s Note: DNF is reader lingo for Did Not Finish.

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Buy One Dark Wish by Sharon Wray on Amazon