Narrated by Rock Engle
Hard Pursuit is book three in the Delta Force Brotherhood series of romantic suspense novels by new-to-me author Sheryl Nantus, and although I haven’t read or listened to the other books, I was perfectly able to follow the story here, so it worked fine as a standalone. However, the series title, the cover, the book blurb, the ex-special forces hero – all of that led me to expect a romantic suspense novel complete with heart-pounding, fast moving action scenes and an intense romance developing under pressure… but that isn’t what I got. Rather, Hard Pursuit is the story of a young woman finally learning to step out of the shadows and start to live for herself, and a man driven by revenge learning to let it go and move on with his life. Neither of those are bad things – it’s just not what I was expecting – and the romantic chemistry between them is lukewarm at best.
Five years before this story begins, former soldier Trey Pierce was injured in a hit-and-run accident that killed his best friend. Ever since then, Trey has been working to track down the driver of the car that mounted the sidewalk and ploughed into them, taking as his starting point a distinctive birthmark he’d seen on the driver’s arm. He’s also been part of the Brotherhood – a small team of former special forces operatives dedicated to giving help to those with nowhere else to turn (it’s the A-Team but without BA and Mad Murdoch) – for the last five years, an organisation put together by his friend Dylan McCourt (hero of book one).
When Dylan’s girlfriend – a former cop-turned-PI – is employed by businesswoman Ally Sheldon to track down Ally’s missing brother, Dylan brings Trey on board to help; his computer skills are second-to-none and Dylan knows he’ll be a big help in tracking the missing Vincent Sheldon online… plus he suspects that Trey will be very interested to see the photograph of Vincent that Ally has provided, which shows a very distinctive marking on Vincent’s arm, an intricate tattoo that looks as though it covers a port-wine birthmark.
Ally’s parents were killed in a car accident when she was young, and she was adopted by her uncle and aunt and brought up as their own alongside their son Vincent, who, it quickly emerges, is a spoilt brat who was never told “no” and who grew up having his every whim indulged. Ally’s parents left her their half of Sheldon Construction, and now her uncle has stepped back from the day-to-day running of the company, Vincent is in charge and Ally does most of the work behind the scenes. But while Vincent is personable and does know the business, he’s also an alcoholic and gambler, and is prone to disappearing on weeks long benders. Knowing this about him, but turning a blind eye, his parents employ a ‘handler’, a former marine whose job is to keep an eye on Vincent, make sure he doesn’t get into any trouble and that he gets to where he’s supposed to be when he’s supposed to be there. Vincent has given Edgar the slip a couple of times before, but has always turned up after a few days; this time, however, he’s been missing for over a week, and, with a big presentation coming up, Ally is worried about his safety and worried about him not being back to make the pitch in a couple of weeks’ time.
The first part of the story is mostly taken up with Trey and Ally getting to know each other and Ally learning to trust both Trey and her instincts. She has been relegated to second-best because of her uncle and aunt’s blinkered view of Vincent (and because she’s a woman – grrrr!), but his continued absence means she is going to have to take the reins now, and undertake some client meetings and site visits. She knows the business inside out, but also knows some clients won’t like dealing with her instead of Vincent (having a penis apparently makes him a better businessman); she asks Trey to accompany her to meetings as moral support, and I enjoyed the way her confidence grew. At the same time, she and Trey are becoming closer, and although he’s been holding back from becoming involved with her – after all, he may have to tell her that her brother is guilty of (at the very least) vehicular manslaughter – that eventually becomes impossible, and they give in to the attraction that’s been building between them.
But of course the path of true love can’t be allowed to run smoothly. It’s hard to say much without spoilers, so suffice it to say that my opinion of Ally took a bit of a nosedive later in the book, when she takes Vincent’s part against Trey, in spite of everything she’s come to know about Trey over the past few days and weeks (and everything she knows about her obnoxious shithead of an adopted brother). She does realise her mistake not too long afterwards, but I couldn’t quite buy the idea that the shock of finding out about what Vincent had done and her intrinsic family loyalty would have blinded her so completely. That plot point might work better for others than it did for me.
Rock Engle is an experienced (but new-to-me) narrator and has an extensive list of romance narrations to his credit (a search at Audible shows more than sixty), but it took me a while to get used to his style of delivery which is, for the first part of the book at least, so laid-back that I wondered if he was going to be able to convey any sense of urgency or tension when needed. The pacing is on the slower side – although not horribly so – and his performance is suitably expressive, but I had to crank up the volume on my mp3 player, because phrases and sentences would often tail off at the end and I couldn’t always hear them properly. And while Mr. Engle differentiates well between Trey and Dylan, and does a great job with portraying Vincent as the total shit he is, with a whiny, blustering tone that fits him to a T, the character voices he uses for Trey and Ally are so similar that I often had to rely on dialogue tags to work out which of them was speaking. His portrayal of Ally isn’t bad – in fact, had he used a lower pitch for Trey, I’d probably have been praising his portrayal of the heroine; the problem I had was that the two are voiced in the same register and there’s not enough of a difference between them. The “star turn” however, is Mr. Engle’s portrayal of Edgar; his English accent is excellent, and he perfectly captures the character’s exasperation with his charge and his understated sense of humour. I’d listen to a book about Edgar with Rock Engle narrating it! In fact it was his interpretation of Edgar that nudged my narration grade up to slightly above average!
I did enjoy some aspects of both story and narration in Hard Pursuit, so it wasn’t a complete disappointment, but it didn’t wow me either. I may try another book by the author and do plan to listen to something else from Mr. Engle, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend this audiobook.
Caz
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