Steel’s Edge by Ilona Andrews

Narrated by Renee Raudman

I’ve been saving this one up for a rainy day listen. When Lea asked me to review a Renee Raudman narrated audiobook for A Week of Renee Raudman, I thought Steel’s Edge would be the perfect listen.

Steel’s Edge felt darker in tone than the previous Edge books and it also felt somewhat “meatier” to me. It was also a complete winner. The combination of an excellent story and a favourite, skilled narrator could really be nothing less. I had thought I might struggle to listen to this one and get my review in before Christmas but because it was JUST THAT GOOD. I found reasons to listen and finished in about four days.

Our hero, Richard Mar, was first introduced in Bayou Moon. The Mar family now lives in the Weird, which is a parallel universe akin with magic and Lords and Ladies. Richard was born in the Edge – that world which is neither the Broken (our world) or the Weird, where there is magic but less strong than in the Weird and where basically everyone is outcast.

Charlotte De Nay, our heroine and the main player in the story, was born in the Weird. She is the most gifted magical Healer of her generation and at age seven was taken from her parents and educated by the state of Adrianglia. After completing her ten years of training and her ten years of compulsory service, she is given an estate. Charlotte longs for a family of her own but events transpire against her and something happens which frightens her so much, she escapes to the Edge to avoid temptation. Healers have a kind of yin/yang thing going on. They can heal but the same power can do harm as well. Healers are forbidden to do harm but sometimes people are so horrid that the temptation to harm another becomes (for Charlotte) almost unbearable.

There she meets Eleonore, Rose’s grandmother (from On the Edge), and settles into a life of (mostly) contentment. Richard Mar is brought to her, badly injured, after a run-in with slavers and then more things happen which means that Richard and Charlotte band together to stop the slave trade in the Weird forever and always. During this time, they fall in love – it’s quick but the atmosphere is very pressure-cooker and they are mature so I had no difficulty in buying their mutual devotion.

The beginning is a little slow. Charlotte doesn’t meet Richard for quite some time and there’s a fair bit of set up of Charlotte’s character and motivations. Fortunately, I found the narration so entertaining that the slowness didn’t bother me.

There are some things at/by the end of the story about which I still had questions but overall, it was a cracking good listen. There’s plenty of action, a romantic interlude to break the tension, and then the story goes into a risky “Mission: Impossible” type con which ramps things up again. Once Richard enters the story, we get his POV as well and, happily, George and Jack also feature in the story as well as Lark (all of whom readers/listeners will remember from previous books in the series).

Renee Raudman is one of my favourite narrators. I like the way she renders character and I enjoy her humour which marries so well with the text here. The part with Richard and the balcony and the rope was so funny with Ms. Raudman’s inflections. I think I would have found it amusing in print but it was laugh-out-loud funny for me in audio format.

I heard an interview with Renee Raudman recently where she said that she read the narrative portions of a book in the voice of the character whose POV that section is in. I hadn’t particularly noticed it before. Perhaps that’s because many of the listens with her as narrator have been first person, but I paid special attention to it here. It made the POV shifts so easy to parse. When we are in Charlotte’s POV, the narrative sounds the same as Charlotte’s character and, when we are in Richard’s POV, the narrative sounds the same as Richard’s character. There are also brief POV sections from George and Lark’s POV and the same holds true there. It is a very effective method of narration in my opinion.

Sometimes the more “posh” voices sound a bit too condescending for the characters they are tied to (but very often the “posh” characters are condescending so sometimes it fits very well) but I found little to fault in the narration. There were one or two minor hiccups where a word or two in a sentence was emphasised incorrectly (I could tell from the context) but otherwise the production was, as usual, clean and clear.

Ms. Raudman also narrates the (excellent) Kate Daniels series by this author.  In that series, the hero is Curran – he is a lion shifter with a wonderful growly voice (a favourite of mine). I was pleased that Richard sounded different from Curran. Richard is a different character altogether than previous heroes in this series and from Curran. He is fairly straight-laced, a little uptight, and very much bound by honour. His brother, Kalder, is the lovable rogue type but Richard is more sedate. That doesn’t mean he’s a doormat or a bore. He is skilled and passionate and amusing, but he is different to other heroes and Ms. Raudman’s portrayal reflected that.

I loved Steel’s Edge. I think it’s probably the best book of the series and a fitting end. There are darker themes – slavery is not a light-hearted matter and the set up takes a little time, but the story is clever and the narration is stellar.

Kaetrin

Narration:  A-

Book Content:  A-

Steam Factor:  Glad I had my earbuds in (but fairly tame)

Violence:  Escalated Fighting

Genre:  Urban Fantasy

Publisher:  Recorded Books