Fatal Mistake by Susan Sleeman

Narrated by Rachel Dulude

I wasn’t even fifteen minutes into Susan Sleeman’s romantic suspense novel, Fatal Mistake, when I realised I’d made a catastrophic mistake in deciding to listen to it. I’m a fan of the sub-genre and am always on the look-out for authors to add to my “must read/listen” list, but instead, I’ve found one to add to my “must avoid” list. The storyline is trite, predictable and filled with stereotypical characters, info dumps, hackneyed dialogue and more introspection and internal monologuing than one can shake a stick at. The principals seem to have aced “Jumping to Unfounded Conclusions 101”; there’s way too much telling and not enough showing, which means that characters make huge leaps of logic and arrive at conclusions for no reason that is made clear to the listener, and the author completely fails to create even the vaguest sense of sexual attraction between the principals. Reviews the novel are overwhelmingly positive, and the blurb promised a “riveting” read… but all I was riveted to was my watch as I kept checking to see how far I was from the end.

When the story opens, Tara has just discovered a load of bomb-making equipment belonging to her childhood friend and neighbour, Oren Keeler. Terrified that Oren is going to return any minute, Tara calls the FBI Major Incident Hotline; there has been a spate of bombings in recent months, carried out by someone who has become known as the Lone Wolf – and Tara is certain it must be Oren. The agent who answers her call is the coolly collected Cal Riggins, whose unflappability annoys Tara for some reason I couldn’t fathom – surely it’s his job to remain calm and not freak out whichever distressed person is calling for help? Anyway. Realising Tara is in grave danger, he decides there’s not time to wait for his six-man team to assemble so he jumps into a helicopter – without backup – and heads off to the rescue. I should mention here that Cal is an ex-SEAL who carries around a ton of guilt about all the people he’s failed to save over the years. Because of course he does.

Then we fast forward to his finding a severely injured Tara somewhere in the nearby woods – she’s been shot and is in danger of bleeding to death, but the listener doesn’t hear the altercation she must have had with Oren – we’re just told it happened.

In the hospital when Tara comes to, she and Cal talk about Oren and her suspicions – and I was profoundly uncomfortable when she explains that she suspects Oren converted to Islam when they were at college because – get this – he wasn’t attractive and couldn’t get girls. At first, he became a goth because it made it seem like he was odd “on purpose”, and then he converted for the shock value. She’d already said something in the opening scene about Oren being a religious convert with links to ISIS (because of course he has – he’s a Muslim so he must be a terrorist, right?), but this is… well, I can’t even.

Somewhere around this point – I can’t remember exactly, because my mind was still reeling – Cal makes a comment about their not having a lot of time to find Oren, because it’s nearly the first of the month, and there will be another bombing. Huh? Does Cal have a crystal ball? Assuming he’s not clairvoyant, the listener is once again deprived of any knowledge of the thought process that has led him to this thought and is left to assume that perhaps that is the bomber’s pattern. But I don’t know. The crystal ball theory might be the correct one.

Shortly after another mind-numbingly dumb conversation, in which Tara tells Cal that she speaks three languages fluently (French, Spanish and Russian – which is a relief to him, as if she’d been fluent in, say, Arabic, it could have been a problem) Tara realises that Oren has managed to get past her guards in the hospital, and bolts. THREE DAYS after she had been in danger of bleeding to death, she is able to go on the run. But don’t worry – apparently her internal organs were only bruised, so no biggie.

All this happens within the first half hour of the listen. How I got through the other nine-and-a-half, I will never know.

Skip ahead three months, and Tara is still in hiding – well, as far as anyone who is being followed by a string of dead bodies can be in hiding. Oren has now taken to killing women Tara has come into contact with, and Cal is more determined than ever to find her. Fortunately, one of his team members finds Tara via Google (!), and we’re treated to a massive info-dump as she explains to Cal how she did it. Tara has just taken a job as a fire warden at the Mount Hood National Forest in Oregon, so off he goes to find her. (Does speaking three languages qualify Tara to sit around all day staring at trees? Enquiring minds want to know.) Cal’s convinced she hasn’t told him all she knows and wants to get her back to DC, both for her own safety and to help with his investigation. The author tries to set up a mutual antagonism by having Tara resent Cal’s trying to order her around – because her ex was dictatorial and no man is ever going to push her around again. *sigh*. But it totally fails, as does the attempt to construct a romance between the two. We are told there is an attraction between them that they’re both aware of… but they’re the only people who are aware of it, because this listener certainly wasn’t feeling it.

It can be difficult to make an accurate assessment of a narrator’s performance when the material they’re given to work with is so spectacularly poor. I haven’t listened to Rachel Dulude before, but she delivers a decent enough performance – albeit not one that has inspired me to want to seek out any more of her work. Her tone is sometimes a little overly bright and her pacing is a bit on the fast side, but she generally differentiates well between the characters – although I did have to rely on dialogue tags sometimes in scenes in which there were more than three or four characters speaking. Her portrayal of Cal is quite good; she adds a husky note to a slight drop in pitch which is enough to make him sound sufficiently masculine, although her portrayal of the other male characters isn’t as successful. I found her characterisation of Brynn – the team’s techie person – to be extremely irritating; I’m not sure what it was about her interpretation that bugged me, I just know that it did. I also noticed several points at which Ms. Dulude failed to convey the right degree of emotion or where she didn’t accurately reflect a character’s mood as described in the text.

Fatal Mistake is an Epic Fail in pretty much every way possible. The characters are bland and barely one dimensional, the writing is amateurish, and the story is neither romantic nor suspenseful. I should also say that while the book is billed as Christian Fiction, the faith-based elements are handled clumsily and seem as though they have been tacked on as an afterthought; they mainly consist of the characters calling upon the almighty when their own efforts have failed and there is no sense that faith is a large part of either of their lives. The narration is okay, but nothing more than that.

Caz