Point Last Seen by Christina Dodd, narrated by Vanessa Johansson. Not my favourite.

I used to read a lot of Christina Dodd contemporary romances back in the day so when I saw the prequel novella Welcome to Gothic for her Last Seen in Gothic series on Audible as a Daily Deal I decided to give it a go. It was one of those rare prequels which was a complete (if condensed) story, complete with HEA and it inspired me to request Point Last Seen for review – officially book one of the series.

Whereas the novella included a time travel aspect, Point Last Seen doesn’t.

Gothic is a quirky town near Big Sur, basically owned by a famous acting family. The current “heir” is more of a self-help guru rather than an actor, with many businesses, a line of clothing and ready-to-eat meals. She owns most of the businesses in the town and leases them to the locals.

Adam Ramsdell moved to Gothic for unknown and secret reasons. He’s basically a loner and he likes it that way. He’s an armourer/metal artist. His introduction is more mysterious than it needed to be.

Despite Adam’s reluctance, he’s clearly been adopted by the town and whether he likes it or not, he’s part of them.

Adam is told by “Madame Rune” the local psychic to go to the sea and find a “lost soul”. He does, because reasons, and he finds a woman washed up on the shore. She’s bruised and battered, having clearly been the victim of some violence before ending up in the ocean. He can’t find a pulse but when he lifts her body to transport it, she spews out water and returns to life.

She is “Elle”. She knows there is more to her name but she cannot remember it. She cannot remember very much actually, the trauma of her “death” having caused amnesia.

Point Last Seen wanted me to accept a number of propositions I struggled with. One was not taking Elle to a hospital or even an actual doctor. No, instead Elle is taken to a vet (at least he was formerly a doctor – in the war in Korea) who does not even examine her. This woman had been strangled and drowned. These are things which need to be checked out.

The next was Adam and Elle sharing a bed almost immediately (non-sexually). I know there are romance reasons but I found it hard to believe someone who had been the victim of violence and who had amnesia would snuggle up to Adam the very same day he found her.

The day after, Adam and Elle were talking and Adam said “you know me” in the context of “you know me, I always do this”. When the fact was Elle didn’t know Adam – at all. There were a number of times things like this jarred me out of the story. It made me crabby.

It becomes apparent early on that Elle had been on a research ship in the ocean and had got into a fight with the funder of the expedition because of something illegal he wanted Elle to do which she refused. He was injured and almost killed. Elle went overboard. NOBODY LOOKED FOR ELLE. Logically the first thing you’d do when there’s such an incident (with funder of the expedition being found on deck nearly dead) is at least do a head count!

The villain was so much of a caricature – my eyes hurt from all the rolling.

But wait, there’s more. There was another villain too. This time it was Adam’s nemesis – he was also eye-rollingly bad.

In between those mysteries and the question of who Elle really is (and it’s clear some people in the town recognise her looks somehow even though they’ve never met her before), there is a lot about the quirky locals. There was a vast tonal shift between the serious danger Elle was in and these parts, which didn’t work for me.

Vanessa Johansson narrated both audiobooks. I enjoyed her performance well enough in Welcome to Gothic but less so in Point Last Seen. One of the reasons was that she chose to present Adam as hesitant and nervous – almost to the point of him having a bit of a stutter – when he wasn’t described that way by the text. There was also occasional confusion between which character was talking. Not often, but sometimes, the wrong character voice was used. The text did Ms. Johansson no favours though. I wasn’t enjoying the listen and that makes me prone to being nitpicky.

Point Last Seen was long. So. Long. The time period of the story was only about 3 weeks but the listen clocked in at 11 hours 19 minutes – but it felt longer than that. It could easily have been cut by a third with nothing significant having been lost. There was too much extraneous detail.

I did not enjoy this one.

Grade: C-