The Hideaway Inn by Philip William Stover

Narrated by James Cavenaugh

The Hideaway Inn is one of the first titles published in the new Carina Adores imprint from Carina Press, which they’ve introduced as a trope-driven LGBTQ+ contemporary romance line. They’re publishing one title per month and each will be available in audio as well as in print, and I’m definitely planning on picking up more of them over time. The Hideaway Inn is a small-town, enemies-to-lovers/second chance love story, and while both author and narrator are new-to-me, I liked the sound of the story and the Audible samples I listened to of Mr. Cavanaugh’s work on other titles sounded more than decent, so I decided to give it a go.

When Vince Amato loses his job in spectacular fashion (he’s caught fucking one of his firm’s biggest investors), he returns to the hometown to which he never planned to return in order to pursue a business opportunity. He sells practically everything of value he owns and purchases the dilapidated Hideaway Inn in the small Pennsylvania town of New Hope with the intention of fixing it up and then selling it to hospitality chain Fun Tyme Inc. at a massive profit. Besides making him a lot of money, he’s fairly sure that once Fun Tyme sees what he can do, he’ll land a job there, too.

Things go wrong immediately when his planned journey doesn’t… well, go to plan. The bus he boarded terminates several miles outside New Hope, leaving him stuck in the middle of nowhere with no idea of how to continue further. He’s started walking when, lucky for him, a pickup truck stops on the side of the road. Unlucky for him, the driver happens to be Tack O’ Leary, the high-school crush who broke his heart.

The journey to New Hope is awkward and uncomfortable, for Vince anyway, who can’t ignore the fact that Tack looks as good now as he did back then but is determined to show him that while Tack might not have changed much, he most definitely has. No longer the puny, bookish kid that everyone made fun of, Vince has bulked up and turned himself into a controlled study in hyper-masculinity, from my voice to how I hold my body to my lack of overly expressive emotion. In other words, he’s become a total dick who treats people like crap as a kind of defence mechanism; hurt them before they can hurt you.

Arrived at the Inn, Vince finds the kitchen in chaos. The restaurant is due to host a big Memorial Day luncheon that afternoon, and the chef has just quit. It’s a disaster – until Anita, the restaurant manager, asks Tack if he can help out, prompting Vince to demand: “What makes you think some redneck farm boy knows anything about cooking?” Quite a lot, as it turns out. Tack is at Culinary School training to be a chef.

Lucky for Vince – again – Tack doesn’t turn around and tell his condescending, judgmental arse to fuck right off, and instead gets to work and saves the day. As the restaurant is the only part of the hotel currently open for business, Vince decides to concentrate on it first of all – and for that he needs a permanent chef. No prizes for guessing who takes the job. Or for guessing who end up as roommates, sharing the owner’s apartment.

The story proceeds as you’d expect. Vince tries hard to remain a cold and distant arsehole, but eventually starts to unbend, growing attached to the hotel, the town and, most importantly – to Tack.

The tropes are handled well, if not especially originally, but my main problems with the story are to do with the character of Vince and the lack of any real spark between him and Tack. From the moment they meet again, it’s clear that Vince is holding one helluva grudge over something Tack did some fifteen years earlier, and I was waiting eagerly for the reveal; given the intense bitterness Vince displays, and the strength of his determination to freeze Tack out and not be at all friendly or even behave in a vaguely decent manner, I thought it must have been something truly horrible. But… it really wasn’t. Vince obviously had a crush on Tack when they were younger, and when Tack let him down – not standing up for Vince when he was bullied – Vince was desperately hurt, but that didn’t warrant almost two decades of resentment – during which he appears not to have once considered that Tack might have had problems of his own – and his current dickish behaviour. Vince comes across like a petulant man-child, while Tack – a far more engaging character – has matured and learned to own his mistakes and to want to put them right.

The conflict in the story is, of course, centred around Vince’s intention to flip the hotel, so it’s easy to see the Black Moment coming a mile off. But it’s Tack who initiates the reconciliation, while Vince is all set to bugger off and sell the hotel – and he never apologises. He never apologises for being a dickhead either, but Tack forgives all without the slightest grovel.

There are a handful of secondary characters in the story, but none go beyond the two-dimensional, and Tack’s ex-wife and child (six-year-old Jules) felt like little more than plot devices, especially Jules who feels as though they’re in the story simply to show that Vince and Tack are meant to be. Plus, the author made the odd decision to write the epilogue from Jules’ PoV; they’re supposed to be six and they sound like a teen.

James Cavenaugh is an experienced narrator and he delivers a strong performance here. His pacing is good, if a little slow in places (not horribly so), and he portrays the two leads distinctly and in ways that accurately reflect their personalities. He adds a cold, harsh edge to his voice to portray Vince, gradually losing the edge and adding warmth as the story progresses and he starts to fall for Tack and for his new life. Tack’s voice has a softer timbre and is pitched slightly higher than Vince’s, and the audible smile in his voice serves well to show him as a kind, good-hearted man who is confident in his own skin. Mr. Cavenaugh injects an appropriate amount of expression and emotion into his performance and differentiates effectively throughout; his female voices are more than decent and while he can’t quite sound like a six-year-old, his portrayal of Jules is nicely-judged and doesn’t resort to falsetto.

Despite my criticisms, The Hideaway Inn wasn’t all bad. I liked Tack a lot, the story is well-narrated, and the representation is good (there are a variety of queer characters and Anita is a wheelchair user). I can’t give it an unqualified recommendation, but I may give the next in the series a try.

Caz

Buy The Hideaway Inn by Philip William Stover on Amazon