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Fair Catch by Heidi McLaughlin, narrated by Stephanie Rose & Nelson Hobbs

February 22, 2024 / Kaetrin

Fair Catch by Heidi McLaughlin, narrated by Stephanie Rose & Nelson Hobbs. Spoiler Alert: I DNF’d it.

Fair Catch was my first book by Heidi McLaughlin and I fear it is very likely to be my last. I did not enjoy it. There are plenty of people who disagree with me: the book has a 4.37 rating on Goodreads. It was just not for me. Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I just like football too much.

Kelsey Sloane is a book editor in Portland. She receives a submission for a contemporary sports romance set in the world of NFL. Not knowing anything about football herself, she wants to make sure the author has her world building correct. So, she asks an assistant at the publisher to connect her with the city’s NFL team, the Portland Pioneers, so she can verify the sports stuff in the submission for herself. That was in the blurb. I really should have known better. Still, I have gone with stranger set-ups in the past and “romance reasons” covers a lot of ground.

(Aside: if Kelsey receives a submission featuring a surgeon does she have to observe a surgery to make sure the author knows what’s she’s talking about? Kelsey – Google/YouTube/Wikipedia is your friend.)

Anyway, because (and this, I could – mostly -believe) the assistant’s roommate works with the team, Kelsey is invited to a practice where, rather improbably, the coach assigns the centre, Alex Moore, to teach Kelsey all about football, instead of, you know, the assistant’s roommate who works with the team).

Alex is immediately deeply smitten (understatement) and wants to pursue a relationship. Kelsey is extremely naïve and my impression was that she didn’t really understand the level of Alex’s interest in her, nor his celebrity. She was very diligent and apparently skilled at her job but she seemed otherwise fairly clueless. (Perhaps that impression would have changed had I listened to more of the book.) For example: she asks Alex how to watch football (on her TV) as she doesn’t know how. Which… really? (Yes, I know some games are on cable but still.)

Alex invites her to a game. He messages her that he’s left a ticket for her. She doesn’t go because she thinks the game is next weekend instead of the weekend he tells her he’s left a ticket for her because that makes sense.

When she doesn’t show at the game, Alex’s teammates suggest he has to go bigger to really get her to understand how much he’s into her. They say he should get her sideline passes. SIDELINE PASSES.

I’m an Australian. Yes, I support the 49ers (go Niners!) and watch NFL so I know something about American football but even so it does not take much research (oh the irony) to know that sideline passes to games are not given out willy nilly. The NFL closely controls who is allowed on the sidelines. A book editor and would-be girlfriend of the team’s center is not ever going to be given a sideline pass. I seriously doubt it’s even possible for a center to obtain a sideline pass to an NFL game. There’s a reason Taylor Swift is in a box at the Chiefs games (except if they win the AFC Championship; then she’s on the field with Travis’s family on the field to watch the trophy presentation and to celebrate).

Then, at about chapter 6 or so, it is casually thrown into the story that the Portland Pioneers won the Super Bowl the year before. And I just couldn’t. Can you imagine the Chiefs allowing some random book editor onto their practice field and Andy Reid assigning an actual player to teach said editor about football? It’s beyond belief. My eyes were sore from the all the rolling.

World building means something to me and I could not believe the world this book was set in. It seemed to me like everything was just a flimsy excuse for two people to get together and have what I’m sure would be a lot of hot sex. And yes, to one degree, that’s what happens in romance – if you squint.

I love romance and I love a good hot sex scene. I even love a guy who is gone over his lady. But I do need a story around it that makes sense to me and Fair Catch did not. At least not up until that point and after then I was out.

Both Stephanie Rose and Nelson Hobbs are skilled and talented narrators. I’ve listened to both before. However, they were not enough to save the book for me. I didn’t listen to enough of the book to make much more comment on the narration other than that it was good in terms of character differentiation, pacing and tone, as I’d expect from this pair.

Probably if someone doesn’t know anything about NFL and/or doesn’t care, then Fair Catch would work better for them than it did for me. For me however: DNF.

Review at Dear Author

February 14, 2024 / Kaetrin

I’m over at Dear Author with a review of When Grumpy Met Sunshine by Charlotte Stein. This one had me laughing out loud most of the way through the book.

Review at Dear Author

February 8, 2024 / Kaetrin

I’m over at Dear Author with a review of Love, Naturally by Sophie Sullivan. Entertaining low-conflict and low heat contemporary romance.

Random in Death by JD Robb, narrated by Susan Eriksen

February 7, 2024 / Kaetrin

Random in Death by JD Robb, narrated by Susan Eriksen. Solid entry into a series which is very like catching up with old friends – but with added murder.

Reviewed for AudioGals.

Narrated by Susan Ericksen

Random in Death is book 58 in the In Death series. 58. That’s a pretty amazing feat all in itself. I took a break from the series for a little while (at about book 53 I think) but then came back to it last year and binged the books I’d missed. Now I’m right back into it.

I suppose it’s theoretically possible to start with this book – it does cover a discrete police investigation – but I suspect most of the nuance would be lost. That said, I think one could skip quite a few of the middle books if one was inclined and be just fine with this one.

Eve and Roarke remain happily married and banging regularly; McNab and Peabody are still happy and together; Mavis and Leonardo (with Bella) join the story, as do Charles and Louise and Dr Charlotte Mira – along with more important roles for Nadine Furst and her lover, Jake Kinkade, lead singer from Avenue A – and the rest of the Murder Squad at Cop Central. Knowing who all these people are and watching how they’ve grown throughout the series is half the fun of it.

At an all-ages Avenue A gig, a 16-year-old girl is murdered. Given she dies in Jake Kinkade’s arms, Eve is called in straight away. It quickly becomes clear that the murderer is an incel type and he won’t stop at just one so it’s a race against the clock before more victims end up on Morris’s slab at the morgue.

I’ve always enjoyed how J.D. Robb can make me care about characters quickly and Random in Death is no different in that regard. The family of the murder victim and their devastation got to me straight away.

The In Death series has a romance in it but it is not a romance series as such, not anymore. Now it’s a police procedural set in the near future (with many cool things) with more than a small helping of “slice of life” scenes from Eve and Roarke and their increasingly broad found family. I’ve grown away from police main characters in romance to a large degree but I think that the In Death series is set in the future (albeit only 40 years or so into the future) helps me here; they’re even farther removed from real life.

There’s not a lot more I can say about Susan Eriksen’s narration. She is the voice of the In Death series for me. Even were I to read a book in the series, I would hear her voicing all the characters. It’s a bit of a double-edged sword; she’s so closely associated with In Death for me that I can’t listen to her narrating anything else without thinking of Eve and Roarke and everyone else. On the other hand, she’s just fantastic with this series. She has a large cast of characters of all ages to play with, plenty of accents and the opportunity to grow many of those characters as are they are recurring in the series. She manages to keep all the accents straight as well. Charles and Louise may not appear in all that many books, but when they’re there, their voices are the same from book to book.

Random In Death has an evil criminal, sympathetic victims, an engrossing (if sometimes extremely lucky and possibly quite improbable) investigation and fantastic characters. While it’s not the best entry into the series, it is very solid and is far from my least favourite. Audio is generally my preferred medium for In Death books because Susan Eriksen is so good and this one did not disappoint.

Grade: B