Flirting with Fire by Kate Meader

Narrated by Carrie Brach

Flirting with Fire is the first book in Meader’s Hot in Chicago series, featuring members of a Chicago Fire Department family, the Firefighting Dempseys. The Dempseys are a foster family, and the children they’ve raised – some of whom they also adopted – have become firefighters like their foster dad. In this first book, heroine Kinsey Taylor is a ball-busting PR guru who pretty much kicks ass and takes names in the PR department. Now working for the Chicago mayor, one of her first jobs is to let Luke Almeida, a Dempsey family member, know that he can’t just pick fights with the Chicago Police Department and get away with it without creating a public relations disaster.

Of course Luke had a good reason – and he’s not about to let Kinsey order him around, unless of course it’s in bed. The chemistry between the two sparks right off the bat. Kinsey’s one weakness, however, has been to bend to the will of a man. She left her home in San Francisco to follow a man to Chicago, with disastrous results, and in this case, she’s determined to keep all the passion in the bedroom, and not fall in love again or let another man change her. Luke has also been burned in a relationship and isn’t too eager to go that way either. Of course, it’s romance, so the story is all about following their journey to negotiating a Happy Ever After, with some conflict along the way.

The book set the groundwork for the series, so there was a lot of character introduction and backstory, and some hints of things to come, as well as a secondary “romance” (hard to really call it that, since there was very little actual relationship building) between Luke’s brother Gage, from whose POV the relationship was imagined, and a chef who seemed pretty reluctant to get involved. Or even talk. Maybe they’ll get their own book later.

I sometimes wish I had read a book before listening to the audiobook. Even when the narrator is, at a minimum, competent, the interpretation and even the story line can be affected by their performance. Complicated plot lines, multiple characters with similar sounding names – sometimes these can run together, and it’s not like you can flip back a page or a chapter and skim to find a reference. And it’s pretty normal for me to seek out the audiobook after reading a story I like – the narration adds to my enjoyment when done well, and I like revisiting the book. In this case, while listening, I often thought that reading it first might have made it easier for me to really feel their pain and joy, and keep all the characters straight. Narrator Carrie Brach is new to me, and I’m conflicted about her performance. She reads fast, almost a rapid staccato some of the time, in a manner more suited to detective novels, maybe, or thrillers perhaps. Her actual delivery is devoid of the things that annoy me about inexperienced narrators – no odd pauses, out of place breaths, weird pacing. Her dialog and acting were above average. However, wow – did she have some odd pronunciations all throughout this book, or what? “Lithe” rhymed with “with”, she emphasized the second syllable in “lethargy”, she pronounced “tousled” (as in hair) as “tussled” – and the author used that word a lot. “Ogled” became “oooogled” and how about “nukular” for “nuclear”? I think I even heard her say my least favorite mispronunciation “miss-CHEE-vious” but I didn’t make a note of it in the list I started about half way through, so maybe not.

Mispronouncing words is a big negative for me, so it would take a lot to bring a grade back up from that. Brach’s pacing – while sometimes a little frenetic – was at least consistent, and not unpleasant, so I stuck with her to the end. She did make some character differentiation but it wasn’t that marked, and I often confused Luke and Kinsey during dialogue since she didn’t really use a pitch difference for them all the time, or accent, or sometimes anything different. She had a tough-guy voice (and inner voice) for Luke’s younger brother Gage; a tough-girl voice for younger sister Alex; she used some accents for the foster kids Luke took to a ball game – she wasn’t bad at the the things she did right, but overall I wasn’t a fan of this narration. I planned to pre-DNF the next one in the series, but there’s a different narrator, so I’m on board. Still, I think I might read the book first.

Melinda

Narration: C

Book Content: B-

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Minimal

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Flirting with Fire was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for a review.