Heroes Are My Weakness by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Narrated by Erin Bennett

Annie Hewitt arrives at remote Peregrin Island, off the coast of Maine, in the dead of a snowy winter night. In a Kia. Cue the spooky music. She’s in search of her mother’s implied legacy at the cabin she inherited when her mother died – a cabin she hasn’t visited since she was a teenager and was almost killed in a teenage prank. Suddenly she sees a man riding a dark horse through the blizzard, hell bent for leather. The Kia dies – and thus starts Susan Elizabeth Phillips’ first Gothic romance. (Music swells.)

Leave it to SEP to use her quirky sense of humor as a foil to the elements of horror and mystery in Heroes Are My Weakness. Annie finds herself between a rock and a hard place – after spending her life savings on her mother’s illness, she has nothing left but her ventriloquist puppets and the hope that the legacy – whatever it is – will end her financial woes. She isn’t expecting to be reunited with her teen nightmare when Theo Harp appears, dressed in 18th century clothing and carrying period weapons. A sullen teen whom she found a danger to be around 18 years before, Theo is now a reclusive author of best-selling horror novels. He isn’t any more keen to have Annie on the premises, snooping around and asking questions about the two women in his life who died – his twin sister and his wife, both under dark circumstances.

There’s a haunted house, complete with mysterious moans; misdirections, miscues and mischief abound. Is someone trying to kill Annie to get to her mother’s legacy before she does? Who fired the gun? Who left the menacing message painted in red on the wall?

It was a bold stroke for SEP to step outside her normal (still quirky) contemporary romance style to channel Daphne du Maurier’s classic Gothic novel, Rebecca
. She creates a world where nothing is as it seems, and populates it with some humor and a lot of mystery and emotion and a small-town’s worth of characters whose motives have strong, ethical roots even if the methods aren’t very honorable. It took me a long time to warm to the subject, but I was becoming more drawn in by the end.

Erin Bennett had some very big shoes to fill to narrate SEP – I cut my audiobook teeth on the incomparable Anna Fields’ narrations of all the early (pre-2007) SEP releases. Anna Fields/Kate Fleming was a true master – she had infinite character voices, and could deliver the dry, unconventional wit of Phillips’ prose flawlessly. SEP narrations since Ms. Fleming’s death in 2006 have been hit or miss (often miss), but Bennett had high ratings from other reviewers on other genres. It was a tough sell for me – with a slow start to the story, I kept waiting for Bennett to show her ability to deliver the humor. Her voice is very pleasant; her ability to differentiate among all the characters was very good, even if she didn’t use a noticeably low pitch for male voices. She didn’t use any special or regional accents for the human voices, but used a lot of imagination with the puppets who were Annie’s alter-egos and spoke in her head throughout*. I felt she missed several opportunities to showcase the off-the-wall farce elements – I wondered if she had read any of SEP’s other work (not that I expect that of narrators, but in this case, it might have tipped her off that some of the non-puppet dialogue she was reading was, in fact, meant to be droll). It was more than 2/3rds of the way through before both the story and the narration started to click into place for me.

I plan to give it another try in a few months – some of SEP’s books didn’t really grow on me until the second or later listens (yes, I do a Chicago Stars marathon every couple of years!). It’s an interesting new take on an old genre, and it challenged me to open my mind to new possibilities – her mastery of the multiple mysteries was excellent – I truly had no idea what was coming next. I had a hard time grading it in comparison to other SEP books, because it isn’t really comparable to anything else she’s written, even though there were echoes of other storylines and characters from time to time (for instance, I felt Annie reflected both Molly and Blue in some ways). It’s not exactly comparable to other romantic suspense, either. I’m going with a solid B for both content and narration, because they were good but, sadly, not as great as I anticipated.

(*I am not a big fan of the puppets in this book, either as written or as performed. YMMV.)

Melinda

Narration: B

Book Content: B

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Minimal, some more graphic detail of past events

Genre: Contemporary Romance/Romantic Suspense-ish

Publisher: Harper Audio

Heroes Are My Weakness was provided to AudioGals for review by Harper Audio