The Protector by Jodi Ellen Malpas

Narrated by Alexandra Baldwin & Owen MacMahon

I had high hopes for The Protector. I am a sucker for a rescue trope and the bodyguard hero usually has that sort of thing in spades. Unfortunately, my hopes were not realised. Not at all. The Protector was my first book by Ms. Malpas and my experience here does not make it likely I will read/listen to her work again.

Jake Sharp is a professional bodyguard and former SAS sniper. He clearly has something traumatic in his past and prefers to be on assignment to take his mind of his problems. If he is not on assignment, then running, drinking or fucking are his preferred methods of distracting himself from his demons. He freely admits he doesn’t make much of an effort to please the women he’s with – apparently he manages to do the pleasing in spite of himself.

Jake was at pains to tell me how good he was. He’s the best of the best at being a bodyguard. Unfortunately, his actions didn’t always (or often) match up with his ego. He clearly had PTSD which manifested itself in severe and debilitating flashbacks. This actually makes him a liability as a bodyguard.

Jake is asked by Camille Logan’s father to protect his daughter. Cami’s father is a kind of Rupert Murdoch figure (except not with a media business) and Cami is a kind of Paris Hilton. She’s a rich girl who’s photographed all the time by the paparazzi and has the reputation of being flighty, ditzy and irresponsible. However, Cami is actually a successful model and she refuses to rely on daddy’s money. With her BFF, Heather (another trust fund baby), Cami plans to open her own fashion line – Cami will design and Heather will sew. (Presumably at some point it won’t just be Heather doing all the sewing?) They are looking for investors but are having no success. When mysterious threats are made against Cami, her father spares no expense to hire Jake. He offers Jake 100,000 pounds a week to shadow his daughter! (Is anyone rolling their eyes yet?)

Over the course of the book, Jake and Cami fall in love, evil is thwarted and the Jake finally deals with his demons so they can enjoy their HEA.

The setup is strange. Jake is only one person after all, and he is solely responsible for Cami’s safety. Cami balks at this and actively tries to shake him from her tail. Given the threat is credible and Cami knows it, this made no sense to me and left me wondering about Cami’s judgement and maturity. Why Jake was the only bodyguard didn’t make sense either. I’d have expected a pair of bodyguards on duty most of the time and a shift rotation but I don’t think Jake’s professional skills were the point. The point was to force the pair together.

Jake is often distracted by his libido and his attraction to Cami while he’s “at work” made me question his own assessment that he was the bestest bodyguard in the entire world. Frankly, he really wasn’t.

It wasn’t just the set up that didn’t work for me. I didn’t quite understand the instalust and there was a lot of telling and not much showing. Added to that, Ms. Malpas continually used some really weird word choices. My impression was that she had a new thesaurus and was determined to use it. Unfortunately, a synonym isn’t always a synonym. Context matters.

Here are some examples of what I mean – actual quotes from the book.

• Having me retract in shock
• I scoff my thoughts
• Embracing my fierce hug
• Do me the decency of
• A face riddled with awe

And my personal “favourite”:

• thorns from overgrowth severing my cheeks

The narration wasn’t great either but it was slightly better than the story.

Of the two narrators, Owen MacMahon’s performance worked best for me. He gave Jake an accent straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie – which was fine, except that it didn’t match the accent given to him by his co-narrator (Ms. Baldwin made Jake sound much more upper class). Mr. MacMahon seemed to run out of breath occasionally, putting in odd pauses which didn’t make any contextual sense. However, he did deliver emotion pretty well and I found his voice pleasant enough to listen to.

Alexandra Baldwin’s performance, on the other hand, was much harder for me to bear. She is clearly not a native Brit. While her accent was okay, it was obviously not native (soften has a silent t even in a British accent. Other dead giveaways are: “syoot” instead of “suit” or “arht” instead of “at”). I could almost hear her concentrating on her accent as she was delivering her lines. This had the effect of rendering her narration somewhat emotionless. She also (and I think this was deliberate) used a very languid pace which I found boring. Cami didn’t sound passionate or excited – she sounded jaded and bored. She sounded like her image rather than her actual persona. Ms. Baldwin also had odd pauses in her delivery from time to time often and her depiction of a little girl late in the in the book was unconvincing to say the least (again, Mr. MacMahon did better with this). So, all in all, I did not enjoy her performance.

What can I say? I didn’t like the story. I didn’t enjoy the narration. The cover on the other hand is very pretty.

Kaetrin

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Narration: C-

Book Content: D+

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence Rating: Fighting; Trigger Warning: Intimate Partner Violence, not by hero

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Publisher: Hachette Audio

The Protector was provided to AudioGals by Hachette Audio for a review.

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