Law Man by Kristen Ashley

Narrated by Kate Russell

Hello, my name is Melinda and I’m a KA addict. [“Hello, Melinda”] I went 9 months without reading a KA book [polite applause] but then they were released on audio [knowing nods] and I just had to inhale…

Yeah, KA is one of romance’s most contagious, cracktastic authors – without realizing it, without even knowing why, readers are swept into the KA universe and sucked into the whirlpools of her characters’ lives. Her prose has been criticized – run-on sentences, bad grammar and worse punctuation, controlling, beyond-alpha heroes. To be totally honest, her characters are Not My People. I’m not like them; I don’t have friends like them; I don’t want to know these people in real life. And yet, I crawl into my reading space unable to stay away and cannot seem to get enough of these women who tell us, in first person stream of consciousness POV, every single stupid thing that comes into their heads about these impossible men and their totally incredible relationships. And I want more and more and more of this guilty pleasure.

Law Man‘s hero is Denver detective Mitch Lawson. He’s had his eye on attractive neighbor Mara for years, but Mara lays it out for us – for him – for anyone who will listen – that she’s not good enough for him. She had a trailer-trash upbringing and her mama made it clear that people like Mara don’t deserve good things. When she finally lets Mitch in, we spend a lot of time in Mara’s head, in Mara World, where she berates and belittles herself; he spends a lot of time telling her she has her head up her ass if she thinks she’s so unworthy. Yeah, it sure makes him seem like a jerk but such are the heroes in KA-speak, and we agree with them. The book has a suspense angle – Mara’s cousin Bill is involved in drugs, and Mara takes temporary custody of his children when he gets in over his head. The suspense is done well, slipped in while we’re enjoying the journey with Mitch and Mara, until suddenly it takes over the driving and pushes the story to the end.

When we heard KA’s work was being recorded, there was some discussion here about narrators. There was a faction who felt that KA’s mucho macho alpha men needed to be performed by a man. I was a strong dissenter – you can’t have a man narrating a book written in female first person POV!! It just wouldn’t be right. When a book is written from the first person, even the other characters are filtered through the speaker’s mind, and must be voiced accordingly. Enter Kate Russell – what a find! She really nails the delivery of Mara and her screwed-up Mara World.

Of course, all narrative is voiced as though spoken by Mara (except for a few pages of third person POV), but Russell has a wide array of character voices, for Mitch, for the children, for Elvira – my favorite! She totally gets the overall tone of the story – Mara’s innocence and sweetness, Mitch’s attitudes (complete with tough guy accents), even the other KA heroes that wander in and out. I had a couple of problems with her narration. First, there were several times her adenoidal delivery (like she had a cold in da nose) made me want to offer her a tissue. The other quibble is her tendency to interject odd, out-of-place stops and pauses, usually where there is a list of things separated by commas. She stops at the first comma as though it were the end of the sentence, then starts up with item 2 as if starting a new sentence altogether. Since the rest of her delivery is so natural, I wondered why she was committing these newbie errors! This seemed to get worse at the end of the book, during the exciting climax of the suspense. But overall, just like you get over the run-on sentences of KA’s heroines, you get over Russell’s occasional wonky delivery issues because she gets it mostly right. I don’t think I can avoid it: I’ll definitely be listening to the whole series now, hoping I can stay ahead of the releases of  this incredibly prolific author’s audiobooks.

Melinda