Footsteps of the Past by Felice Stevens

Narrated by Denis Lambert

Footsteps of the Past is book 2 of Felice Stevens’ Second Chances series which is based around a group of queer friends. One of the group is Chester (“Chess”) who has been in a relationship with wealthy hotelier Andre for the past 9 years.

When the book begins, Andre has been in Europe for 6 months and the couple have been making do with Skype, phone calls and a precious few brief weekends together. But finally, Andre is heading home. After so long apart, both are excited and a little nervous to see one another – have things changed between them? How hard will it be to pick things up and settle back to “normal”?

The day before Andre arrives home, Chess is tagged in some Instagram photographs which show Andre kissing another man in a nightclub and this obviously casts a pall over the homecoming. However, it takes Chess far too long to actually talk to Andre about it and I’m not entirely sure that Andre’s response was good enough.

Chess has deep secrets about his youth when he lived on the streets and turned to sex work to survive. He turned his life around and is now a respected college professor. Andre has deep secrets around his own youth and a relationship which was destructive and had a link to the death of his best friend, for which he feels much guilt. It was kind of astounding to me that the pair had been in a relationship for NINE years and none of this had come up before. It did make me doubt just how deep their connection was.

After Andre comes home, he and Chess head to the Andre’s mother’s estate in the Hamptons for a couples break to reconnect. While there, all these secrets come out and Chess and Andre need to fight for their relationship to survive. There’s an evil ex and evil mother (Andre’s) and interfering but well-meaning staff and friends as well. It was… a lot.

The first section of the book was a bit of a slog for me. The plot was just too overwrought and the angst meter was dialled way past 11. But added to that, weirdly, there was a lot of nothing happening. There was a lot of thinking about it and worrying about what might happen and some boring domestic things but not a lot of actual movement. I don’t mind a bit of angst but I prefer it to be combined with action.

The second half of the book did add some action to the piece at last and the listen became more enjoyable for me then. One of my friends told me that she thought this was a weaker book from this author than others so it might be worth trying a different title at some point. I admit I’m not in a hurry.

The narration was good, but it wasn’t enough to elevate the experience overall. Mr. Lambert has a pleasant voice to listen to and his pacing was fine, but it also didn’t have that extra “something” that makes a stellar performance either. I found it solidly in the B range – good, not great. However, there wasn’t enough differentiation in the main character voices so I had to rely on context or dialogue tags a lot of the time. I would listen to Mr. Lambert again with less hesitation than I would try the author again though.

For listeners who are after a fairly slow-moving angst-ridden read where a couple of frank conversations (some of which needed to take place years earlier) would have done a world of good, Footsteps of the Past might be a standout listen. For me, not so much.

Kaetrin

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Buy Footsteps of the Past by Felice Stevens on Amazon